When God Feels Distant

I have some very close friends who live far away. I hate the distance between us and how a coffee or a walk is generally impossible. However, I am thankful for technology and how we can meet every couple of weeks via video to catch up and do a biblical book study.

During our most recent meeting, we concluded by sharing how we can be praying for each other. I admitted out loud for the first time that God feels distant for me right now. I know it’s a feeling and not a reality. God is omnipresent. But while my mind knows this, my heart hasn’t been feeling it.

Identifying When God Feels Distant

 I am not an extremely deep feeler. I have friends who are, and I admire their hearts and how their emotions ooze out so easily. I share my heart easily, but I am sometimes slow to identify how I’m feeling so that I can share. I require an intentional assessment of how I’m feeling in order to identify issues.

At the time I determined my distance with God, I was in a good season. It was before the full force of COVID-19, and I didn’t have any major problems or issues that are necessitating deep reliance on God. While I am grateful for the respite from some of my tougher seasons, I do miss the forced dependence on God. I also recognize the discomfort and tension that comes with a good season when I watch friends going through hard ones. Little did I know I had some forced dependence right on the horizon!

I am acquainted with a woman whose pastor husband recently struggled with mental health and made the choice to exit this world. He left behind his church, his wife, his four young children, and others. His wife spoke to a group of other pastors only a couple of months after his death. She spoke of how close Jesus felt to her in this season. She said she would never wish her pain on anyone, but she wished we could all experience the closeness she was feeling. How inspiring!

Her words are true, though. It’s in the dark places that we experience his closeness the most. When we find ourselves in a good season, we should rest and take steps to ready ourselves for the next dark season. We should also lean into God. His closeness is still there. We just have to exert effort to experience it.

Steps to Take to Draw Closer to God

 Here are the steps I am taking to draw closer to my creator again:

1. Say it out loud and ask for prayer. It took me too long to recognize that God was feeling distant for me. There are so many God-related things in my life as a church planter and worship leader. I have been writing some original music recently to honor him. I talk to our church members and children about him daily. I was engaging in the book study I mentioned with my friends. How could he feel distant? I can think about God and talk about God and still not be intimate with God or share my full heart with him. My first step was to say it out loud to my girlfriends and ask them to come alongside me in prayer.
2. Change your routine and how you interact with God. I have shared before that I am not a morning person nor a morning quiet time person. I pray to God throughout the day and read my Bible at different times throughout my day and week. I listen to different podcasts and read books that draw me closer to him as I am able. In a time when he feels distant, though, I change up my routine. I set aside more intentional, consistent time to seek him. Maybe he’ll lead me to make this my new routine, or maybe it’s temporary to draw my heart back to his. I will let him reveal that to me as my process unfolds.
3. Search your heart and assess whether or not God is first. “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart”(Jer. 29:13 NIV). Have you put something in your life ahead of God? This is what I’m asking myself. I don’t know the answer yet. There’s nothing ahead of him that I can identify, but it takes time to search myself and see if that is the truth. It’s a daily choice, and unseen idols can appear at any time. We must take time to look for them and hand them back to God and reprioritize.
4. Be honest with God. God can handle it when we tell him he feels distant. We can repent of not seeking him more intently and ask him to lead us in how we seek him going forward. Even writing this blog in this season is a way I am sharing my heart with both God and you. (Also, speaking of honesty, even worship leader pastor wives feel distant from God sometimes. This doesn’t make us less effective. It makes us human.)

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I began following the above steps, and about two weeks later the country shut down due to COVID-19. When God feels distant, whether in the middle of a global crisis or at a time when things are good, we can be certain of two things:

1. We know he will make himself known. He is a good God.
2. We know the timeline will not be ours. We can be sure patience will be required.

God has graciously made himself known to me as we have drawn near in how to lead our church through the pandemic. As I seek to draw my heart closer to his, I pray this is an encouragement to you if and when you find yourself in a similar season. I pray our gracious Father will reveal himself to you as you identify the distance, verbalize it, change your routine, and express your heart to our loving creator.

Amy Wiebe is a Jesus follower, wife, mom of three, church planter, finance director, and lover of sarcasm and deep conversation with friends. She also loves camping, rafting, skiing, sewing, and having people over. Amy blogs with her husband at fringechurch.com.

Photograph © Anh Nguyen, used with permission

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