Have you ever experienced a dry season? A time when you wonder if your brain has checked out? Maybe you are older and wondering if it’s dementia or Alzheimer’s. That’s where I’ve been. In a dry season. Call it writer’s block, a dry spell, creative burnout, overload. The result is the same. The inability to put a coherent sentence onto paper. The Holy Spirit hasn’t stopped nudging me; I’ve just been unable to translate my thoughts to put on paper.
Our spiritual lives can go through a dry spell too. A time when God seems distant, when we can’t hear
his voice, when we can’t feel his presence. A time when we wonder if it’s Him or us. Has He abandoned
us or have we abandoned Him?
Recently, I picked up a copy of Charles Spurgeon’s book, Faith What it is and what it leads to. It’s an easy, quick read and I highly recommend it. I was reminded by Spurgeon that we are humans subject to emotions and feelings. Way too often, we give credit to our feelings as a source of truth when, the reality is that emotions can be very misleading.
Have you ever felt discouraged or felt like you don’t make a difference? Then, an opportunity came along that should you have great impact on the lives of those around you? Maybe someone came up and thanked for something you thought was so insignificant, yet it made a very large difference in their life? Have you woken up one morning to look at your spouse, children, a friend or family member and felt like you no longer loved them? Deep down you knew that feeling was not accurate and later that day, when you were overflowing with love for that person, you wondered how you could have ever felt that way.
Likewise, too often we let our feelings dictate our relationship with God. I don’t read my bible because I’m not “feeling it.” I wonder where God is when I’m praying and not receiving my answer, so I stop praying. I doubt my faith when a question I’m asked makes me uncomfortable because I don’t have the answer or because the question makes me rethink something I thought I understood. There are many ways we let our feeling and emotion interfere with our relationship with God. Satan loves to use our feelings to get us to question the love our Father has for us.
Well, here is the truth. Feelings are unreliable and God is not. He is always with us. That we don’t feel His presence or hear Him speaking to us is because of us – not Him. During these times we need to immerse ourselves in His word. We need to turn to a spiritual friend and talk about it. We need to sing songs of worship to Him. We need to keep reaching out and focusing on Him rather than focusing on the world and how it makes us feel. If we do this, we will find he’s been with us the whole time.
May your day be blessed!
-psg-
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