The inconstancy. It kills me.
And all you can do is throw up your hands and throw off your mustache hat, offer up a quick prayer in the general direction of upwards, and call it a day as fast as you can, before anything else goes wrong.
You go through these dry patches, where all of the sudden any communion or intimacy with the Lord is sapped up, and you’re left with the question of whether what you so recently felt with God was all that you thought it was. God feels distant. Motivation to delve into the Word is fleeting, if it's there at all. Your heart feels somehow out of step with the world, and the absence of His voice is filled only by a vague ringing. It’s the same feeling that floods your lungs like an unexpected winter chill, when you step outside in the morning only to find that it’s 20 degrees colder than it was the day before. It steals your breath and sends you reeling in defense.
Sometimes walking with the Lord is the hardest thing in the world. There are these desert days, amidst all the perfect days of truly savoring His presence, where the only glory you can glimpse is hidden just out of sight, shimmering on the horizon. The warmth seeps out of the day so fast it catches you off guard. And all the songs of God’s love are just distant melodies caught up in the wind. The real world doesn’t disappear when you come to Christ, nor do its seductions. And though the war is over, the battle still needs to be waged, day by day, minute by minute.
The only way forward is through the flames. Christians were never meant to be sealed off from the trials of the world; there is no righteousness if there is no faith, there is no faith if there is no trust, and there is no trust if there is no test.
And sometimes the test is no more than a dropped connection, when everything just kind of fizzles out into a curiously distant dial tone.
But what’s even worse is the guilt and the fear that take up the prowl, when the sun sets and all the traces of your long months of steady walking fade into nightfall. Keep those beasts as far back as you're able!
Thank God that His faithfulness isn’t as temperamental as ours.
There’s hope here. You see, I’ve finally come to value these desert stretches, when things are dry and distant, the pieces seemingly impossible to connect. I'm finally getting used to this, that walking with the Lord doesn’t mean feeling good, doing good things, or having things go well. It means staying thirsty. And there is nothing that has made me thirstier for the presence, power, glory, mercy, justice, rest, and comfort of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ than these times where I can’t feel Him.
His love is His promise. His faithfulness is foolproof. They are built upon a perfect foundation. And even when my mind can’t seem to grasp anything more than a name, I’ll hold on to that name all the more tightly, even during the dry times. Especially during the dry times.
It’s been hard to get to a place where I feel like I’m prepared for the Race ahead. The wait is the worst. Every time you feel like you’re growing, the winds race through and you’re in a dry patch once again. And those dry times when you’re left alone, when you can’t even feel the closeness of those around you let alone the closeness of the Lord – it’s tough. And all these questions and doubts and uncertainties swirl around you in a roar of commotion. Incoming support has flattened out. Independent work has swept the campus like a plague. Temptations gnaw at you from all sides, and apathy settles in like a coat of dust. Things just pile up. It gets really stinkin’ tough to hear the Lord sometimes, through it all.
But the beautiful currency by which we base both our faith and the hope for which we live, is the unblemished accountability of the Lord to quench our thirst.
So I’ll stay thirsty.
Love
Danny
