When God Feels Far, He is Near
Anyone who has attempted to pursue a vibrant spiritual life knows that prayer can be full of ups and downs. Sometimes we experience periods of great consolation and comfort. Other times, prayer is marked by an intolerable dryness or boredom. For seasons, God can feel so close and faith so easy, but at other times we may wonder if God has abandoned us.
It's in these latter experiences, those times of so-called abandonment, that the spiritual journey can feel really, really hard. What’s happening then?
The testimony of scripture is that God never leaves us. While it is common to feel like we have been abandoned or that God is nowhere to be found, the reality is, he’s still with us. If he hasn’t left us, then that means our experience of abandonment is about something else. Rather than interpret the felt experience of absence as God leaving us, it’s better to think of it as a movement to a different dwelling space in the soul. This isn’t a shift in location. It’s a transition from one level of the spiritual journey to a deeper one.
Early in my spiritual life, prayer felt like hanging out with my best friend. I had so much fun being with God. I experienced rich, even ecstatic times in prayer. It was like making a new friend and going out on the town for a few hours on a Friday night. But this type of relationship with God was grounded in the belief that I was separate from him. I would live my ordinary life, which was difficult and exhausting, and then I would go to God to get something, to be filled up and feel better. This way of relating to God left him compartmentalized out of the vast majority of my everyday life. And, as much as I enjoyed being with him, a large part of what kept me coming back to the relationship was the feel-good experience I would get when we would “hang out.”
When I first started to experience God’s absence in prayer, I thought I was doing something wrong. I wondered if God was angry with me. Or, I worried that I had sinned and he had pulled away. But the opposite was true. He was drawing me deeper. This may seem counterintuitive, but typically the experience of absence in prayer is a sign that God wants us to go deeper with him. He hasn’t left. He is inviting us to let go of whatever need or yearning initially drove us to seek him for help, and instead discover that just being with him is enough. This can even include letting go of our need to experience positive feelings when we pray. This may seem odd, but if we can accept this, we can usually notice God’s presence with us in a new way in the midst of the absence. This is how God forms us to believe that we are never separated from his love. This faith is not dependent on good feelings or positive circumstances.
The Apostle Paul compares the spiritual journey with the experience of growing up. Just as we outgrow our childish ways of being in the world, so too we outgrow our childish ways of relating to God. When we go to God in prayer only to get good things or positive feelings from him, we are relating to God in a childish way. God indulges us early in our spiritual journey but this is not the goal of the spiritual life.
He wants to relate to each of us in a more sustained and ongoing way – one in which we are always united to him. This takes a lifetime to achieve. We begin with short intense experiences in prayer that keep us coming back, but then through absence, God calls us deeper and deeper into intimacy with him through a strengthening faith.
This never seems pleasant in the moment. Most of us resist the difficulties associated with growing up. When confronted with absence in prayer, we may lament that prayer isn’t as “good” as it used to be…or that God isn’t helping us with our problems. When that happens, pause and wonder about what God is doing. He isn’t actually absent. He’s beckoning you to a new place. If we resist this invitation and demand that God “show up” the way he used to, then we are being childish. This is a bit like wishing to return to the age of 8 because it was so fun to experience the euphoria of Christmas as an 8-year-old. But God, in his love, wants to wean us off his gifts (Psalm 131). He wants you and me to fall more in love with him than with the benefits that being with him provides.
Are you experiencing any absence in your prayer life? How might you welcome this not as God’s abandonment but rather as God’s invitation into greater levels of intimacy? Pause and notice that God is still with you — he is inviting you into greater depths of intimacy.