Faith After Loss: What to Do When God Feels Far Away

Can I tell you the prayer I prayed in some of the darkest seasons of my life?

It was not eloquent. It was not the kind of thing you would frame and hang on a wall. It was usually something closer to: “I do not understand this. I do not feel You. And I am not sure I have enough faith left to keep doing this. But I am still here.”

That was it. Some days, that was all I had.

And I want you to know that God met me in that prayer. Not in spite of its honesty. Because of it.

When faith gets complicated by loss

There is a version of faith that is easy to hold when life is going well. When prayers get answered the way you hoped. When the pieces fit. When God feels close and present and clear.

And then loss happens. Or it keeps happening. And that easy faith starts to feel like it belongs to a version of you that no longer exists.

I lost my mom on January 25, 2022. I watched my adoption journey fall apart after years of loving two children I could not bring home. I walked through deployment after deployment, through a business closing, through a version of myself I did not recognize in the mirror.

And through all of it, there were seasons when God felt very far away.

Maybe you know that feeling. The silence where you expected an answer. The absence where you expected a presence. The prayers that seemed to go nowhere. The faith that felt like it was held together with something much thinner than you thought it was.

What nobody told you about doubt

Doubt is not the opposite of faith. I had to learn that the hard way, because I grew up believing it was.

I thought doubt meant something was wrong with me. That I did not believe hard enough. That I had somehow failed at the most important thing.

What I have come to understand is that doubt is often what happens when your faith is being asked to grow larger than it currently is. It is not a sign that God has left. It is a sign that the version of God you were holding was too small for what you are walking through.

The God I found in the trenches, the real one, not the tidy, manageable version I had constructed, is bigger than my doubt. He is big enough to hold my anger. My questions. My silence. My “I do not feel You right now but I am still here.”

He can handle all of it. He always could.

What to do when God feels distant

I want to give you something practical, because I know how disorienting this season can be. These are not magic steps. They are just what helped me find my way back, or rather, helped me see that He had been there the whole time.

Stop performing your faith

If you are not okay, stop pretending to be in your prayers. God is not impressed by polished. He is drawn to honest. Bring Him the real version, even if it is messy and angry and full of questions.

Go back to the moments He showed up

In my hardest seasons, I would go back in my memory or in my journal to the moments when I could not deny that God was present. I would remind myself: He was there then. He has not changed. The circumstances changed. He did not.

Let someone else carry the faith for a minute

There is a reason we are not meant to do this alone. When my faith felt like it was down to a thread, I leaned on people whose faith was fuller than mine in that moment. I let them pray when I could not. I let them believe on my behalf until I could again.

Stay in the room

Even when it feels hollow. Even when you are just going through the motions. Do not walk away from God in the season He is trying to meet you. Sometimes faithfulness just means staying in the room.

He is not finished

Here is what I know from the other side of some of my darkest seasons: He was there the whole time.

Not in the way I wanted. Not in the way I asked. But there. Quiet and steady in ways I could only see looking back. In the friend who showed up without being asked. In the scripture that found me at exactly the right moment. In the inexplicable peace that settled over moments that had no business being peaceful.

He was in the trenches with me. He is in the trenches with you.

You do not have to feel it for it to be true. You just have to be willing to stay.

If this conversation belongs in your church or community, you can invite Jen to speak. If you want to keep going, read Finding God in the Trenches or learn more about Surrender.

You do not have to figure this out alone. And you do not have to have it together to begin.