What To Do When God Feels Far Away

When you feel far away from God, it can feel like forever until you find your way back. You don't feel like you're home.

It's an uncomfortable feeling, darker than loneliness for its emptiness. For you feel hollow, forgotten even. Your head knows you are not forgotten by God, but the ache of your heart tells you something different.

Your heart tells you it is what you can trust, not your head. You are not free to be rational. You are not free to remember who you are—a beloved daughter who is delighted in. You want only to heed your heart, a heart that, actually, feels so untrustworthy now. A heart that may lie and a mind that wants your heart to listen to what must be true—despite it not making logical sense.

For when God feels far away, your heart tells you, once more: Dear one, you don't have to keep chasing God. You need only know Him. Walk with Him. Listen for Him.

And you quiet, wanting to believe this could be true: God is close; God is here, despite the state of your heart and its untrustworthy whispers. For God gives away clean hearts. And it's not because you deserve it, but, rather, because you totally don't.

So you let your mind relax and your heart open up now—for you are unwilling to stay in the dark, where emptiness feels like death and God is life and hope. It is true: it is God you want, more than anything.

So, these lies about not being okay have to go. There's no room for them in a heart washed out bright and new and clean.

No more battle then, please. Instead, let's choose God's rescue and our obedience.

Let this be a rebel's determination to choose life rather than death, to choose God and fullness, not hollow, empty space.

Come now, Father, mend these broken hearts. We are the rescued now, the fearless. We do not dread the quiet with you; we dread life without you, and our full hearts are what inform our minds now: stay here, where there is beauty, where it is safe.