The Year the Certainty Went

It did not go in a crisis. That is what makes it so hard to talk about, and it is why she has told two people and both of them handled it badly through no fault of their own.

There was no argument with God. Nothing terrible happened. Nobody let her down. What happened is that at some point in the last year she noticed that a thing which used to arrive had stopped arriving. She used to have a sense of Him. Not visions, nothing dramatic, just a warmth underneath the day, an interior confirmation that showed up in the ordinary places and had done since she was nineteen.

It is not there now. It has not been there for a year, maybe longer, and she is not able to locate when it stopped, which she finds worse than if she could.

She still goes. She still reads. She has not become anything, which is another part of the difficulty, because there is no word for what she is. She is not a person who left. She is a person standing in the same room doing the same things with the floor gone.

And the two people she told both said something well meant that made it worse. One suggested a book. One suggested she look at whether something in her life had come between her and God, which she has now examined at four in the morning nineteen times.

Plenty of people are in this and saying nothing. I am not going to hand anybody a diagnosis or a program. I have no word about when the sense comes back, and anybody who claims to know is guessing. What I want to do is talk about what is under her while it is gone.

A city with foundations, and a tent to wait in

I want to put a line down and pay attention to where the man in it was living.

For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.Hebrews 11:10

That is about Abraham, and the verse immediately before it says that he lived in tents. Both things at once. He was looking for something with foundations, and he was, for the entire duration of his life, in temporary accommodation. He never saw the city. Hebrews says so plainly a few verses later: these all died in faith, not having received the promises.

Which means the writer of Hebrews is not describing a man who felt certain. He is describing a man who kept walking toward something he could not see, and the chapter calls that faith rather than calling it a deficiency.

You are held by a city whose builder is God, and the holding has never once been done by your sense of it. That is not a soft word for a hard year. It is what is written in Hebrews 11, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and sets it under somebody sitting on a wooden chair. The certainty was a gift. The foundations are God's construction.

And notice the two verbs at the end of that line. Builder and maker. The Greek behind them is architect and craftsman, the one who designs it and the one who does the work. Neither of those is the person looking for it. Abraham's contribution to that city was to keep facing it.

You have a foundation you did not lay and cannot damage, and a year without the feeling has not moved one stone of it. Hebrews 11:10 is where that is written, and it is the Spirit of God who holds a person in a room where nothing is arriving.

Nobody is being told to try harder

Now the part this category exists for, and it goes in front of everything else.

She is not in trouble. She has not done something. The idea that a lost sense of God is always evidence of an unexamined sin is a cruelty that has been handed to sincere people for centuries, and it has driven more of them out of the room than any argument ever did. I am not going to hand it to anybody.

Sometimes it is illness. Sometimes it is exhaustion. Sometimes it is grief that has not been named. Sometimes it is nothing anybody can identify, and the great writers of the tradition describe it as something God does rather than something a person causes, and they describe it happening to people well ahead of most of us.

My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?Psalm 22:1

That is a psalm, which means it was authorized for public singing, and it is the sentence Jesus chose on the cross. The absence of the sense of God is inside Scripture, given words, and put in the mouth of the Son.

You were given language for this in the book itself, and using it is not a fall. Psalm 22:1 is written, sung and quoted by Christ, and it is His Spirit who lets a person say an honest sentence without believing they have just broken something.

You are standing right now, in a year with nothing arriving, and the standing is not being done by your feelings. It is written that the city has foundations and God is its builder and maker, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person in the room when the room has gone quiet.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the four in the mornings. A dry year has medical causes far more often than anybody says out loud, and being held by God has never been a reason to go without a person in the room.