I Feel Nothing When I Pray

It has been two years and one month, and she knows that because she can date the last time.

It was a Tuesday, and it was nothing dramatic, and she was in the kitchen with the radio off, and something in her turned over the way it always had. She did not know it was the last one. Nobody ever does.

Since then, nothing. Not doubt, and she is very clear about this distinction and she is right to be. She has not stopped believing any of it. She could argue the whole thing for you on a wall and mean every word. It is that she prays and it goes out of her into a room with the acoustics of a filing cabinet. No lift. No warmth. No sense of anybody there. She reads and the words are just words in an order. She sings on a Sunday and it is like reading a menu out loud.

She has kept going. That is the part I want you to notice and she will not let herself notice it. Two years and one month of showing up to a thing that gives her nothing back.

And then this spring she was reading Romans, because she reads properly, straight through, and she came to it.

And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind.

Gave them up. And there it was. A category she had never once considered applying to herself, and a mechanism that explained the silence exactly. That is what this is. God has handed her over, quietly, without an announcement, and the numbness is not a season, it is the notice.

She has told nobody. Not her husband. Not the woman she walks with on Thursdays who would drop everything. Because to say it out loud is to make it a real proposition in the world that a real person would then have to respond to, and she is not sure she could survive a bad response and she is even less sure she could survive a glib one.

Maybe you have that verse. Or another one. It found you in the middle of a long dry stretch and gave the dryness a name, and the name it gave it was a sentence handed down.

Walk with me a minute. I am not going to tell you the fear is silly and I am not going to hand you a verdict.

Read who Paul is describing, and how they behave

Let me take the passage seriously, because you take everything seriously and you would spot a dodge in a second.

Romans 1 describes a long refusal. Paul says it three times, and each time the shape is the same: they knew God and did not honor Him, they exchanged the truth for a lie, they did not see fit to acknowledge Him. Every step in it is a turning away that the person is doing on purpose and does not regret. And what the giving up produces, in Paul's own list, is not numbness. It is confidence. The people at the end of that passage are not aching. They are approving. They are entirely comfortable and they are recruiting.

Now look at what you are doing on a Tuesday. Two years of no feeling at all, and you got up and prayed into it anyway, and you kept reading straight through Romans, which is how you found the verse in the first place.

You have been knocking on a door for two years that you believe has been shut against you, and Scripture says the one who comes to Him He will never cast out, and that is what is written and not an encouragement I invented, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept your hand on that door. Nobody who has been handed over keeps knocking. The handing over is precisely the removal of the wanting.

All that the Father gives Me will come to Me, and whoever comes to Me I will never cast out.John 6:37

What dryness is, and what it is not

Now the second thing, and this one is older than either of us.

There is a long, well documented, entirely ordinary experience in the Christian life in which the felt presence of God is withdrawn for a season while the person is not withdrawn at all. It has been written about for centuries by people nobody would accuse of having been handed over. It happens to serious people more than to casual ones. And in nearly every account, the person going through it interprets it as evidence against themselves, because that is what the mind does with an absence.

The felt sense of God is not the same as God. It never was. It is the weather over the ground and not the ground.

You were made righteous by a finished work and not by the temperature of a Tuesday, and Romans 5 says being justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, and it is His Spirit who sealed that and He is not consulting your kitchen for a report.

And there is a practical thing here that matters and that nobody may have said to you. Two years of flatness in someone who is otherwise well is one thing, and two years of flatness alongside no appetite, no sleep, and no pleasure in anything else at all is a different thing, and the second one is a matter for a doctor as much as anything else. That is not a spiritual downgrade. A body affects a soul and always has, and the person who checks is the wiser of the two.

The fear is not the evidence

One more, and it is the load bearing one.

Terror at the thought of having been given up is the exact opposite of what being given up produces. The condition Paul describes is characterized by a person who is at peace with the arrangement. There is no one in that passage lying awake about it. There is no one in it walking a coastal path in April with a stone in their chest because they might have been handed over.

You are grieving over the absence of a God you cannot feel, and Scripture calls that grief the work of the Holy Spirit in a person, and the Spirit does not grieve somebody over Himself in order to be rid of them. Numb about God and numb toward God are two different states, and only the first one is on that coastal path, and it has been reading like the second for two years.

You were sealed by that same Spirit on a day you can no longer feel, and Ephesians 1 says you were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the down payment on the inheritance, and a down payment is precisely the thing that does not depend on the weather. A seal is not a mood. It was set once, by Somebody else, and it has not been consulted about April.