Why Do I Feel Far From God and How to Fix It
“Why do I feel far from God?” is one of the most common questions many Christians ask (and I’m not sure churches want to hear them), and it might just be a sign that your faith isn’t dead. Spiritual numbness is one thing. Spiritual hunger, even if it feels like spiritual isolation, is another.
There is a specific kind of loneliness that belongs only to people of faith. It isn’t the loneliness of isolation. It is the loneliness of feeling separated from the relationship that should be the most important. You know God is there. You believe in Him. But something between you feels like a wall of glass, you can see through it, but you cannot seem to get past it.
If it feels like this for you, this is for you. Not to provide you with five steps, but to explain to you what is going on, and how to truly get back on track.
The Gap Is Real, and You Are Not Imagining It
The first thing that is helpful to people in this place is giving them permission to feel like they are far away. A lot of well-meaning Christians will tell someone who feels far from God to just pray more, read more, trust more, as if the feeling itself is a sign of failure. It is not.
There are a number of reasons why you can feel far from God. It can be from unacknowledged sin that has led to a degree of estrangement. It can be the result of a time of mourning, loss or trauma. It can come from a great disappointment with God, something that you prayed for but didn’t happen, something that has not had a chance to be voiced. It can come from pretending to have faith from the outside when you are weak in the inside.
All of these are different, and there is a different way to get out of each. And common to them all is honesty.
The Most Common Reason People Feel Far From God
Among the most common and least talked about reasons why people feel far from God is also the most obvious. It is not sin. It is not doubt. It is shallow spirituality, a prolonged period of shallow communion with God.
Here’s how. Marriage doesn’t break down over one fight. It falls apart because of a thousand small choices to not risk, to not be authentic, to not be vulnerable. It’s the same with relationships with God.
When you get bored with going to church, when you get bored with reading the Bible, when you get bored with saying prayers in the morning, things start to go wrong in your relationship with God. You are still doing the things. But they are bloodless and without life. And one day you wake up and you feel like you are in a relationship with someone you don’t know.
This is not a judgment. It’s a very ordinary part of the spiritual journey in the life of a well-meaning believer. And once you identify it the first step toward resolving it is at hand.
What to Do When You Feel Far From God
The practical steps to returning are not necessarily to add more spiritual disciplines to your life, but to those you’ve already started with more honesty and less performance.
Start With Honesty, Not Performance
The best way to close the gap between your spiritual reality and your spiritual desires is to tell God you feel that way. Don’t “O Lord, I come before you with a humble heart” if you feel like you are in the middle of a desert. Just say it plainly. “God, I cannot feel You right now. I do not feel like I have in a while. I do not know how we got here but I want to get back to You.”
This kind of honest prayer may feel less spiritual than the polished version. It is not. Intimacy is based on honesty. God doesn’t care about our religious language. He responds to a real heart and a real heart sounds a little like this.
Identify What Created the Distance
Mapping this out is an important exercise. When did you first feel bored? After a particular event, after a particular season, a particular failure? After a prayer not answered? After a loss? After a season of busyness that snuffed out the spiritual?
Getting clear about the cause of the distance is not “all about me”. It is diagnostic. If you do not know what you are dealing with, you won’t deal well with it. Someone whose lack of interest is due to a wound is different than someone whose lack of interest comes from boredom. Misdiagnosis leads to wrong treatment.
Do the Last Thing God Said
This is one of the most underused tools available to believers who feel distant from God. Look back in your journal or memor or your prayer life to the last place where you felt close to God. What was happening then? What were you hearing from God? And is there anything that you stopped doing, or began to ignore during that time?
Very often, the distance did not begin at some random point. It began at a specific moment of disobedience, avoidance, or unprocessed pain. Finding that moment does not mean condemning yourself, it means finding the actual thread to pull.
Why Do I Feel Far From God Even When I’m Doing Everything Right
This is a painful version of the question why do I feel far from God, and it should be addressed. There are people who are genuinely praying, reading the Bible, serving others, going to church and they’re not feeling anything. They do not feel warm and fuzzy, or present, or like anything is connecting.
What is happening in these cases is often what spiritual writers across history have called a dark night of the soul. It is a time when God appears to remove the feeling and sense that He is present, not because He is punishing, but because He is inviting us into a more mature faith.
Those who follow God because they feel good in doing so, have not gone deep enough into trust. These dry seasons are where that kind of trust is built. The one who continues to pray, even when they are dry, keeps showing up, keeps coming, keeps being faithful because the feelings are not there, that person is not failing. That person is being purified.
This does not mean that the season is not difficult, painful, and downright frustrating. But it reframes it as something happening in you rather than to you.
Read: 30 Powerful Prayer Points for Mercy (With Bible Verses)
The Role of Community in Closing the Distance
What people in dry spiritual seasons tend to overlook is the part other believers play in their recovery. The natural urge when you feel spiritually dry is to go it alone and to be too embarrassed, or too bewildered, to tell others you’re feeling that way, especially other Christians, who always seem so cool.
That instinct works against you. Alone in a dry desert, it grows. Community, even if it is imperfect, provides a way back.
This does not mean that you have to tell your church how you are feeling spiritually. It’s about finding one or two people who can be authentic enough and healthy enough to accompany you in the mystery. Not to solve the problem, not to tell you a bunch of Bible verses, but simply to be there. This sort of friendship has led more people back from the desert than we might imagine.
What Nobody Tells You About the Path Back
This is something that’s new and needs to be said. The journey back to a closer relationship with God is rarely what we think it will be. So many think of it as a straightforward process, you repent, pray, feel something, and get closer to God. At times that does happen.
But sometimes it’s more like this. You pray with sincerity and feel nothing. You pray again and it is still nothing. You feel a little calm one day, then it’s gone the next. You have a week of feeling less flat. But then you have a bad day. And, before you know it, the flat season turns into a season, and it turns into something else.
This journey home is not made in times of spiritual euphoria but in the humdrum commitment to be faithful. It is built in the days when you read your Bible and it feels dull. It is built in prayers that seem to fall on deaf ears. It’s built in the decision, repeated throughout your life, to turn your face towards God even when you can’t feel Him.
That is not lesser faith. This is true faith.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q1. When I feel distant from God, is it a sin?
No. Feeling far from God is not a sin. It is a signal. It is about how you react to it, whether you allow it to further separate you from God or whether you use it as a signal to stop and think about what’s going on, and to come back to God.
Q2. Is the sense of being far from God affected by mental health issues?
Yes, and this is very important. Our spiritual experience is impacted by depression, anxiety, grief and trauma. A person in the midst of a depressive episode may feel spiritually disconnected because they don’t have the emotional bandwidth to feel strongly, not because they are doing anything “wrong” spiritually. If you think this might be the case, it’s not a matter of dealing with the psychological and the spiritual separately. Both matter.
Q3. Does fasting work if I don’t feel close to God?
Fasting can help on the path back to a relationship with God, but only when it is done in concert with prayer and not as a magic bullet. Fasting without the humility and mindfulness expected of it, is just hunger. Fasting as a prayer of consecration and attentiveness, is something else.
Q4. How do I know if I’m walking away from faith, or experiencing a spiritual dry season?
The difference is a wanting. Someone who is walking away from faith begins to lose their desire for God. Someone in a dry season continues to desire even if they aren’t experiencing God. The wanting is important. It means that something in you is still reaching towards God, even if you are not feeling it.
Closing Thoughts
If you have been asking yourself why do I feel far from God, you are asking because there is still some hope. You have not stopped caring. You have not concluded the relationship isn’t important. You want to find your way back, and this wanting, though it may feel like a long shot now, is part of that answer.
The gap is not unbridgeable. The glass wall is not impenetrable. And the God whom you seek is not distant, waiting with His arms folded. He is with the broken-hearted, and He is closer to you right now than you can feel.
Start with honesty. Start with the mess. Start here. That is always the right place.
