When God Feels Absent
There are times in our lives when God seems distant. We pray, but we don't feel that He's listening. We seek His presence, but the closeness we've experienced before seems to be missing. We may even begin to wonder whether He's there at all.
That can be a lonely place, especially for someone who has known the peace and fulfillment that come from walking closely with the Lord.
But perhaps the question isn't whether God has moved away from us. Perhaps we need to consider where we've placed our attention, what we've come to depend upon, and whether we're relying on what we feel rather than what we know.
Because there's something we can know, even when we don't feel it.
God is real, and He loves us.
When We Begin Walking Alone
It's natural to want to be in control of our lives. We make plans, solve problems, anticipate difficulties, and try to arrange things so they'll turn out as we hope.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with making plans or taking responsibility for our lives. But somewhere along the way, we can begin depending more on ourselves than on God.
We start walking by ourselves rather than walking with Him.
It doesn't always happen suddenly. Sometimes it's a gradual shift in our attention. We become occupied with what we think, what we want, what we fear, and what we believe we need to accomplish.
And we can lose sight of the fact that God is in control.
I believe our conscience often provides the first indication that something isn't right. There's an awareness within us that we've begun moving in a direction we shouldn't be going. We can listen to that awareness, or we can ignore it.
If we continue ignoring our conscience, we risk becoming less sensitive to it. Over time, our hearts can become hardened.
God doesn't force Himself upon us. He has given us the freedom to choose whether we will walk in relationship with Him. And that relationship calls for intentionality, a willingness to turn toward Him and remain receptive to the Holy Spirit.
But there's another side to this.
Feeling distant from God doesn't necessarily mean we've turned away from Him.
The Longing That Comes With Knowing God
I believe there are times when we're genuinely abiding in Christ, seeking Him, and living in relationship with Him, yet we still don't feel the fullness of His presence.
We're human. We live in a physical world, and our experience of God is limited by that reality.
Even Moses, who enjoyed an extraordinary closeness with God, was not permitted to look upon the fullness of His glory.
Why should we expect to experience everything of God while we're still living in this world?
We can draw very close to Him. Close enough that His Spirit dwells within us and His life becomes the foundation of our own. But we cannot yet experience the fullness of being in His presence.
And I think something interesting happens as we grow closer to God.
The closer we become, the more we may long for Him.
We've experienced enough of His presence to recognize that nothing else can compare. Yet there's still something within us that longs for more.
It's a longing that won't be completely satisfied until we're fully in His presence beyond this life.
So we need to be careful about interpreting that longing as abandonment. Sometimes the very thing that makes us feel something is missing is our growing awareness of how much God means to us.
Abiding Is Not the Same as Striving
When we feel spiritually distant, our natural response may be to try harder.
Perhaps we need to pray more. Read more. Become a better person. Make ourselves more spiritual. Find some way to restore the closeness we remember experiencing.
But there's a difference between striving to reach God and abiding in Christ.
Striving places the responsibility on us. We begin approaching our relationship with God as though it's something we must accomplish through our own effort.
Abiding is different.
Abiding means opening ourselves to God and receiving what He offers through the Holy Spirit. It's a willingness to surrender our own understanding and our need for control.
It doesn't mean we stop living, making decisions, or fulfilling our responsibilities. Quite the opposite.
When we're abiding in Christ, we want to do what is good and pleasing to Him. We want to use the talents He's given us for His glory. Our desire to act doesn't disappear. It finds a different purpose.
And there's something else that comes with abiding.
A sense of calm.
Not because everything in life is going the way we want, but because we no longer believe it's our responsibility to determine how everything turns out.
That doesn't mean we stop experiencing fear, dread, excitement, grief, or joy. We're still human, and those feelings are part of life.
But beneath them, we can have peace.
We can experience life's uncertainties without carrying the burden of believing that everything depends upon us.
The Burden of Being in Control
I think we often trust whatever seems easiest to us.
And for many people, believing we're in control of our lives seems easier than surrendering that control to God.
We want certainty. We want to know that our decisions will produce the results we're hoping for. We want to protect ourselves and the people we love from whatever difficulties may come.
But the reality is that we're not in control of so much of what happens.
We can make the best decisions we know how to make, and circumstances can still unfold in ways we never anticipated.
For me, trying to live as though I were in control eventually became inconsistent with what I knew to be true.
I couldn't live that way anymore.
Trying to control what I couldn't control was a source of irritation and agitation. It created a burden that I didn't need to carry.
And there's something remarkably freeing about recognizing that.
God is in control whether we acknowledge it or not.
We still have to go through life's experiences. We still face uncertainty, difficulties, and decisions. But we can go through those experiences believing we're facing them alone, or we can go through them walking with the Lord.
The circumstances may be the same.
The difference is whether we're resting in His care or struggling under the illusion that everything depends upon us.
And when we look back on our lives, we don't have to understand every event or explain why things happened as they did.
If we're trusting Him for our future, it's really easy to trust Him for our past.
Believing Gives Hope. Knowing Fills You.
I think there's a difference between believing that God exists and knowing that He is real.
When we're children, we're encouraged to believe in things we cannot see or understand. Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and other childhood traditions become part of our world.
Eventually, we discover that some of those things weren't real.
They were generally presented with good intentions, but we learned something from those experiences. We learned that not everything we're told to believe is true.
As we grow older, we encounter other disappointments.
We pursue things that promise happiness, satisfaction, and security, only to discover that they don't fulfill us the way we expected.
We chase the shiny objects of life, believing that perhaps the next achievement, possession, or relationship will finally give us what we've been missing.
And sometimes we become skeptical, even jaded.
We learn to question what we cannot see or touch because we've been disappointed before.
That can make believing in God difficult.
How do we distinguish between something we've merely been told to believe and something that is genuinely real?
I can't point to one particular moment when that changed for me.
It happened gradually, over the course of my lifetime.
At some point, when I looked back, I realized that I had crossed a threshold. I had moved beyond simply believing in God.
I knew He was real.
And there's a difference.
Believing gives hope. Knowing fills you.
What does it mean to be filled?
For me, it comes down to something remarkably simple.
Knowing that you're loved.
When you truly know that God loves you, you no longer have to search for that love somewhere else to make yourself complete.
You don't have to find your worth in another person's approval. You don't have to depend on money, possessions, achievements, or relationships to fill the deepest part of yourself.
Those things can still have meaning and value. But they no longer have to provide the fulfillment that only God can give.
You know you're loved.
And that changes everything.
When the Feeling Isn't There
Our relationship with God involves both what we know and what we feel.
But those two things don't always remain at the same level of intensity.
There may be times when His presence seems so close that simply being with Him is enough. And there may be other times when we don't experience that same sense of closeness.
Our feelings change.
What we know about God doesn't have to change with them.
When we feel distant, we can remember the times we've experienced His presence. We can return to the things that have helped us remain attentive to Him. We can consciously turn away from our preoccupation with ourselves and open our hearts to the Holy Spirit.
Not as another effort to make something happen.
Not as a way to manufacture a spiritual experience.
But as a way of abiding.
We can acknowledge our longing without demanding that it immediately disappear. We can accept our limitations without assuming that God has abandoned us.
And we can rest in the knowledge that we are loved.
That's not always easy. Surrender often goes against our natural desire to control our own lives.
But perhaps even our ability to surrender isn't something we accomplish entirely on our own.
Perhaps it's something God gradually brings about within us as we remain open to Him.
God Moves Us Closer
I can't explain exactly how I arrived at the place I find myself today.
I no longer experience the loneliness I once might have felt. That doesn't mean my life is free of difficult circumstances or strong emotions.
I still experience life as a human being, with all the uncertainties and feelings that come with it.
But I know God is real.
And I know He loves me.
That knowledge didn't come all at once. It developed over a lifetime, sometimes in ways I didn't recognize until much later.
Looking back, I don't believe I brought myself to that place simply by trying harder or becoming better at being a Christian.
I believe God moved me there.
And perhaps that's what we most need to remember when we feel distant from Him.
We don't have to force ourselves into a deeper relationship with God. We don't have to produce the right feelings or somehow make ourselves worthy of His presence.
We can turn toward Him, remain open to the Holy Spirit, and trust Him with the work He is doing within us.
We can abide rather than strive.
And when our feelings leave us uncertain, we can return to the simplest truth of all.
God is real, and He loves us.
Sometimes, that's all we need to know.