What to do when God feels far away

Rule out the boring explanations first

Elijah, at the lowest point of his life, asks God to let him die. What happens next is not a lecture. He is allowed to sleep, then woken and fed, then allowed to sleep again, then woken and fed a second time, because the journey ahead was too much for him. The theological conversation comes much later.

Take the hint. A great deal of spiritual flatness turns out to be exhaustion, undersleep, a body that has been running on adrenaline for months, grief, a new baby, illness, or a job that is eating you. None of that is a small explanation and none of it means your faith is fake.

So before you go looking for a spiritual cause, walk through the ordinary ones honestly.

• Have you slept properly in the last two weeks?
• Has something happened — a loss, a betrayal, a diagnosis — that you have not let yourself feel?
• Are you alone with this? Distance often follows six months of nobody asking how you are
• Has anything changed in your medication, health, or drinking?

Then he lay down under the broom tree and fell asleep. Suddenly an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” And he looked around, and there by his head was a cake of bread baked over hot coals, and a jar of water. So he ate and drank and lay down again. A second time the angel of the LORD returned and touched him, saying, “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too much for you.”

1 Kings 19:5-7, BSB

The Bible already has a vocabulary for absence

Psalm 22 opens by asking God why he has abandoned the writer. It is not softened, and it is not filed under warnings. It is a prayer, in the book of prayers, for people to use.

It is also the line Jesus says from the cross, according to Mark's account. Whatever you make of that theologically, at minimum it means the sense of being left is not evidence of a defective spiritual life — the sentence was on his lips too.

This matters practically. If God-feels-absent has an approved vocabulary in Scripture, then you are not in some undocumented failure state. You are in a condition the tradition expected often enough to write liturgy for.

My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why are You so far from saving me, so far from my words of groaning?

Salmo 22:1, BSB

Say it to God, not just about God

There is a difference between telling a friend you are not sure God is there and telling God you are not sure he is there. The psalmist does the second: he addresses God directly and asks why he has been forgotten. The complaint stays inside the relationship.

This is the single most useful thing to change in a dry season. Do not upgrade your prayers to something you no longer mean. Pray the actual state: I do not feel you, I am not sure you are listening, I am here anyway.

That prayer is not a lesser prayer. It is the one on the page, and it has the advantage of being true, which is more than can be said for a lot of fluent praying.

I say to God my Rock, “Why have You forgotten me? Why must I walk in sorrow because of the enemy’s oppression?”

Salmo 42:9, BSB

Keep the practice while the feeling is away

Psalm 77 is written by someone who says he cannot sleep and is too troubled to speak. What he does about it is deliberately unspiritual: he decides to remember what God has done before, and to think it over. He is not manufacturing a feeling. He is doing an act of memory while feeling nothing.

Copy that. Keep a short, low, repeatable morning — two minutes, the same time, no expectation of anything happening. Write down, on a day when you can, the two or three things you believed on the evidence before the feeling went. Read those on the mornings when you cannot generate anything new.

This is not faking it. It is the difference between believing something and feeling it right now, and every long relationship contains stretches of the first without much of the second.

• Same two minutes daily beats a good hour once a month
• Read narrative rather than instruction while you are dry; the Gospels and the Psalms hold up better than the epistles here
• Tell one person. Distance grows fastest in private
• Do not make big decisions about faith at the bottom of a dry stretch, in either direction

I will remember the works of the LORD; yes, I will remember Your wonders of old. I will reflect on all You have done and ponder Your mighty deeds.

Salmo 77:11-12, BSB

Nobody can promise you when it lifts

Psalm 88 asks God why he hides his face, and unlike almost every other lament it never resolves. It ends in the dark. That psalm was kept, which tells you the people who assembled the book knew this could go on a long time.

So this page will not tell you it lifts in three weeks or that God is teaching you something specific. Some people describe it returning gradually and in retrospect. Some describe a season that lasted years. Some describe changing what they believe. Anyone who gives you a timetable is guessing.

What is available is smaller and more useful: you do not have to resolve this today, and you are allowed to keep showing up without a conclusion.

Why, O LORD, do You reject me? Why do You hide Your face from me?

Salmo 88:14, BSB

What this page is not

This is a devotional page, not medical, psychological or pastoral advice. There is significant overlap between the description of spiritual dryness and the description of depression, and no article can tell the two apart for you.

If you have lost interest in things you used to care about, cannot sleep or are sleeping constantly, feel flat about everything rather than just about God, or this has run for months, please talk to a doctor or a therapist. That is not a failure of faith or a step away from it, and for a lot of people treating the flatness is what gives the rest of it back.

If you are having thoughts of harming yourself, contact your local emergency number or crisis line today and tell one person near you tonight. It is also worth finding one honest human being — a friend, a chaplain, a pastor who will not panic — and saying this out loud to them this week.