There's a particular kind of loneliness that comes when the faith you used to feel so certain about starts to feel distant. Not dramatic. Not a crisis, exactly. Just — quiet. A slow drift you didn't notice until the space between you and God felt too wide to cross.
I've been there. And I want to talk about it honestly, because I think a lot of us are living in that quiet without naming it.
"You don't have to have it all together to meet God here."
We're pretty good at performing faith. Showing up. Saying the right things. Doing the motions. But underneath? There's this low hum of disconnection we don't quite know what to do with. God feels less like a presence and more like a concept we used to believe in more easily.
Can I tell you something? That doesn't make you a bad Christian. It might actually make you an honest one.
The Drift Nobody Talks About
After years in ministry — preaching, leading, serving — I hit a wall I didn't see coming. My relationship with God had quietly hollowed out. Not because I stopped believing, but because I had been performing belief for so long that I'd lost track of what experiencing it actually felt like.
I was going through all the motions. But I was doing it from behind glass — present but not really there. You might know this feeling.
But what if you are exactly where you need to be? Maybe you're not as lost as you think. Even though you're feeling blue or miserable or lost or sad — God is present.
From "To Him Who Is Able"The drift happens slowly. A season of stress where prayer slips. A hurt that makes you pull back. A doubt you didn't know how to hold, so you just quietly set it down and kept moving. And then one day you look up and you're not sure where you are anymore.
What I Learned From the Distance
Here's what I discovered in the hardest season of my faith: the distance I felt from God was not evidence that He had moved. It was evidence that I needed to pay attention differently.
Not more intensely. Not with more discipline or more effort or another Bible study. Differently. With more honesty. More room for the messy, complicated, dual nature of what it actually feels like to be human and trying to know God.
Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk writes about dissociation as "simultaneously knowing and not knowing." That resonated deep in my bones when I read it. Because that's exactly what spiritual drift can feel like — you know God is real, you know the gospel is true, and yet somehow you don't know it in a way that lands in your body, your daily life, your actual experience.
Closing that gap isn't about trying harder. It's about showing up more honestly.
"The distance I felt from God was not evidence that He had moved."
So if you're in a season where God feels like a stranger — I want you to know that's a real and valid experience. And I also want you to know it doesn't have to be the end of the story. It might be the beginning of a much more honest one.
Let's make room for it all.
— Jen
