What Do You Do When GOD Seems So Distant?
It is so easy to question yourself: why does the Lord God seem so far away from you when everything in your life seems to be spiralling? This is a moment of anxiety, and you are not alone. As a reminder, the good news is that the Lord has an antidote to your anxiety, and the key to overcoming it is fervent, passionate and unwavering faithful prayer.
Take a moment to reflect on Psalm 13. David, in his agony, felt God seemed so distant from him. He cries out to the Lord: “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death.” [Psalm 13:1-3, ESV]
David expresses his heart to God in prayer. He felt lonely and forgotten, filled with sadness at all hours of the day. God listened, and indeed he recovered from his anxiety. So remember that no matter what anxious moments you are facing, prayer is the answer.
Like David, anxious moments are not ordinary times, and it is not ordinary to feel as if you have failed or the Lord has deserted you. Your thoughts may rather turn into emotions and into a never-ending story. In this circumstance, every ill-thought may be feeding every next thought without stopping, because the devil loves it and will want to make sure it never ends but grows bigger and larger. Beloved, are you in these anxious moments right now, or are you an overcomer through Christ’s antidote?
These moments are seasons of spiritual dryness. Nevertheless, your prayer and plea should always be in gratitude from the start and end of your prayer. The key to offering your gratitude to the Lord is that the central point of your struggles or predicaments shifts your perspective, strengthens your trust in the Lord God’s past faithfulness and present care for your life – the Lord takes notice.
So if you are going through a dry season in life momentarily, and you think God seems so distant from you, the book of Philippians has this to tell you: “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” [Philippians 4:6, ESV]
But there’s always an answer from the Lord to these negative thoughts if you can turn to him with confidence, trusting him with faith and hope. As a Christian, spiritual dry seasons, also known as spiritual wilderness, are a developmental aspect of spiritual growth. They are often part of God’s design to deepen your faith, moving you from relying on emotional feelings to building an unwavering, trusting relationship with Him.
Beloved, God’s promises remain unchanged, so don’t dwell on your feelings because they can be deceptive. The Lord is often doing quiet work in your life that you cannot instantly perceive – it may seem that he is too distant, but he is not. So do not say, “What shall I eat?” or “What shall I drink?” or “What shall I wear?” It’s a season, and you can’t change the times and length of the period; it shall pass.
Here is another simple, naive analogy for waiting on God using the principle of a phone call. In this era of communication through business transactions, placing a phone call to an office receptionist is not just a straightforward procedure.
Depending on where the call is placed, it could be answered instantly, placed in a queue, or go to voicemail. In this circumstance, you can do three things – wait in line/queue, drop the call, or leave a message and wait for someone to call you back, right?
So if no one calls back, what do you do? Naturally, the obvious thing you will do is to call back until you get through to someone or the front desk. As you may be familiar, the result of having your need met by that call may not be an instant – that would not necessarily mean it is the end of the call. Many a time it takes multiple calls before someone calls back. Do you give up? No.
So what do you do when you feel God is no longer as close as he used to be? At worst or best, I say minimize the anxiety, stay focused, and call back to the Lord; don’t drop the call.
Similar to the phone call analogy, as a Christian, our communication tool for drawing God’s attention to us is to dial back in to prayer non-stop.
Never quit praying; your prayers will bring the Lord from far away closer to you, but until you minimize the anxiety, you cannot focus on any positive communication with the Lord through prayer.
Many sincere believers experience seasons when prayer feels empty, when Scripture feels quiet, and when God seems strangely absent. For some Christians especially, those seasons can cause confusion, discouragement, and even shamefulness.
This is the period the devil has crawled between you and the Lord God. Nevertheless, you still have hope in the Lord Jesus to count on.
Thus, let us take comfort in the Apostle Paul’s words in Philippians 4:11-13, trusting the Lord with faith and hope. He encourages every believer that “through Christ’s strength, he learned to remain satisfied, peaceful, and steadfast in every situation—whether facing seasons of deep poverty and hunger or periods of great abundance.”
Note that in all of these, the Lord never seemed so far away from Paul; the Lord was close because of his faith and hope in the Lord.
“Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have learned, in whatever situation I am, to be content. I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” [Philippians 4:11-13, ESV].
The verse above is very encouraging, and therefore we should consider taking a lesson from it. In every circumstance, our prayers should be direct and aligned with God’s faithfulness and his promises for a close relationship with him.
If we have a close relationship with the Father, how can he be so far away from us? No, he won’t. So, like Paul, we have to learn in every situation how to build our faith so that we don’t often feel like we have lost who we are before the Lord. God is never at a distance from us.
When we are stuck in the midst of the worries of everyday life and are continuously striving to make ends meet, we should not forget about our close relationship with the Lord.
Our life as Christians becomes a sequence of tasks for us to complete, and so if dissatisfaction sneaks in easily and unnoticed, the devil will make us doubt our faith in the Lord. So it is very important to put guardrails on so that worries do not drown out the faith we have in the Lord.
We know that we have every spiritual blessing, eternal life, and the Lord’s promise of his constant presence. So instead of living in fear of whether the Lord is distant from us or his promises are not being fulfilled in our lives, we can rest in the knowledge that beside him, he provides for us with everything we need, including the strength to bear difficult circumstances. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in heaven.” [Ephesians 1:3, ESV]. That is anxiety-free.
That does not mean we are invincible or immune to pain, so when we face situations that lead us to doubt and wonder why the Lord is or seems so distant or far away from us, let us be reminded to respond in faith.
Let us have the trust and confidence that the Lord is not far from us because he has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in Him. Never give up, minimize anxiety, stay focused, and keep faith and hope alive.
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