That feeling is all too common to the believer. That feeling, where once a closeness with God was enjoyed, that God’s existence is questioned. If you have been a believer for any length of time, you know exactly what I am talking about right now. Perhaps you are even experiencing it at this moment.
If you are like me, you go through seasons where this is the case. Something that I have found encouraging is the fact that many individuals in the Scriptures also have the same experience. In Thomas A Kempis’s work, The Imitation of Christ, he speaks on emptiness. He describes it as “When you no longer feel the comfort of God’s presence…” [Thomas A. Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (Notre Dame, Ave Maria: 1989), 74]
I love what he writes next. Though it is long, it is well worth your time to read it.
“This is nothing new or strange to those who know God’s ways, for the great saints and prophets of old often experienced such changes; whence, the Psalmist, feeling grace present in him, declared, ‘In my prosperity I said I shall never be moved.’ But when grace was withdrawn he added what he felt inside, saying: ‘You hid your face from me, and I became troubled.’ Yet, in the midst of this, he did not despair but prayed to the Lord all the more earnestly and said: ‘To you, O lord, I shall cry and shall beg forgiveness of my God.’ Finally, his prayer was answered, and he testified that he was heard by saying: ‘The Lord heard and has had mercy on me: the Lord became my helper.’ But how? ‘You have turned my sorrow into joy,’ he said, ‘and surrounded me with gladness.’ If it happened in this way with the great saints, we who are weak and poor should not despair if we are sometimes burning with desire and sometimes not. The Holy Spirit comes and goes according to his good pleasure; whence, blessed Job says: ‘You visit him at daybreak, and you suddenly test him.'” [Kempis, 74.]
Job says it this way,
But if I go to the east, he is not there;
if I go to the west, I do not find him.
When he is at work in the north, I do not see him;
when he turns to the south, I catch no glimpse of him.
But he knows the way that I take;
when he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.
Job 23.8-10 NIV
So take heart today, though you feel not His presence, He is there. His name, after all, is Emmanuel, God with us!
The Library Musings 