Faith & Spiritual Growth
How to Get Closer to God When You Feel Lost
When life becomes difficult and God seems silent, finding your way back to faith may begin with an unexpected emotion: anger.
When C. S. Lewis lost his wife, Joy Davidman, to cancer in 1960, the man who had spent years defending Christianity found himself questioning the God he had defended. In the notebooks that became A Grief Observed, Lewis described praying and feeling as though a door had been slammed in his face. He questioned God's goodness and exposed a grief that refused to be comforted by the arguments he once knew so well. The book was originally published under a pseudonym, its author having written something that sounded less like an explanation of faith than an argument with heaven.
Anyone who has prayed through a long silence may recognize the experience. You can remember every hymn, sit among people who seem certain of God's presence and privately wonder why He feels so far away. Eventually, the question Where are You? may become something angrier, an emotion that many believers struggle to admit even to themselves.
When Even the Faithful Question God
The Bible contains more spiritual anguish than we sometimes acknowledge. Many of the Psalms are laments, including Psalm 13, which opens with a question that has echoed through centuries of human suffering: “How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever?” On the cross, Jesus himself cries out with the opening words of Psalm 22: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
The Book of Job follows a man who loses his children, his livelihood and his health. His friends arrive intending to comfort him, but soon begin explaining his suffering as though tragedy were a mathematical equation: wrongdoing must produce punishment, so Job must have done something wrong.
Job refuses their reasoning and demands an audience with God. When God finally speaks, Job receives no direct explanation for his suffering. In the book's closing chapters, God rebukes the friends who had been so confident in their answers. The people who claimed to understand God's intentions had misunderstood Him, while the man who challenged Him had continued the conversation.
Anger at God is still a way of talking to Him.
The Courage to Continue Without Certainty
Spiritual distance can last a few weeks or stretch into years. When Mother Teresa's private correspondence became public after her death, readers discovered that the woman associated with extraordinary religious devotion had experienced prolonged periods of spiritual darkness.
She wrote of feeling God's absence while continuing to serve the sick and dying in Calcutta. A woman who struggled to feel God's presence spent her life trying to make others feel less abandoned. Her experience complicates the assumption that strong faith must always be accompanied by spiritual confidence.
Most of us encounter this struggle in less visible circumstances. A father worried about losing his job still has children waiting for dinner. A woman caring for her aging mother must find patience after another sleepless night. Someone grieving a death may have to face an ordinary Tuesday while carrying a sorrow nobody else can see.
The Letter of James speaks of perseverance through trials, but perseverance is rarely dramatic. Often it consists of getting through the day and accepting help without treating that need as a personal failure. A trusted friend or a counselor may offer the kind of patient attention that someone in distress cannot find alone.
What If Silence Is Not Absence?
In the nineteenth chapter of the First Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah is exhausted and frightened. He retreats to a cave on Mount Horeb, where a powerful wind tears through the mountains. An earthquake follows, then a fire. Yet the biblical account says that God was not in any of them.
What follows is described in the King James Version as “a still small voice,” although the Hebrew phrase has also been rendered as the sound of a thin silence. Elijah has witnessed extraordinary forces of nature, but the encounter he needs arrives without spectacle.
It would be comforting to believe that every silence conceals a divine message, but the story cannot guarantee that. Some prayers remain unanswered, and no one should be expected to call suffering a blessing. The passage does, however, leave room to question our assumptions about how God's presence ought to feel.
We often imagine that getting closer to God will bring certainty or an unmistakable sign that everything will be all right. Yet the Christian tradition also contains the testimony of people who continued believing through long periods in which nothing seemed to confirm their faith.
Getting closer to God may begin with abandoning the effort to sound like someone who has all the answers. A prayer can be angry or unfinished. It can consist of a few words spoken by someone who no longer knows what to believe.
And sometimes the only honest prayer is the question that began the whole struggle:
Where are You?