A Prayer for When You Feel Far From God
Some weeks you pray and it feels like the words go nowhere. You read your Bible and nothing lands. Church feels like a room full of people who all seem closer to God than you are, and you can't work out when the distance opened up. You're not losing your mind, and you're probably not losing your faith either — this is one of the oldest complaints in the book, and there's a lot of Scripture written from exactly this spot. How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? (Psalm 13:1, ESV) Bringing this to God In years of ministry, this is one of the questions I hear most, and it's rarely asked with anger. It's asked quietly, almost apologetically, as if the person feels they've failed some test. They haven't. Feeling distant from God and being distant from God are not the same thing, and Scripture treats them very differently. David wrote Psalm 13 as a king who loved God and still asked, "How long will you hi...