I love to feel God and most of the time there is feeling attached to my faithing. God made us to feel. He gave us the ability to feel, to rejoice, to laugh, to cry, and to have that inward joy that puts our hearts somewhere in a spiritual zipcode, bringing a supernatural peace and comfort to our souls.

There have been seasons in my faith journey that my “feeling God” has been interrupted by seasons of spiritual static. It’s this sort of funk where I can’t feel God. Instead of peace I find an unsettling restlessness. Instead of light, it seems like a dark cloud. Instead of delight, I find distress. This distress has symptoms of confusion and restlessness, hopeless and apathy. There seems to an onslaught of temptation attached, the chief temptation, to stay apathetic toward the things of God.

I was reading Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556) this morning. He offers a couple of thoughts about why we experience spiritual distress.
1. Because we are listless, apathetic, and careless in our spiritual exercises; it is on account of our own faults that our spiritual comfort is withdrawn.
2. To test our worth, and to show how far we are able to advance in His service and praise without the great reward of comforts and extraordinary favor.
3. To give us clear understanding and insight, to enable us to have a deep inner conviction that of ourselves we are powerless to produce or sustain a flood of devout feelings, intense love, tears or any other spiritual comfort, but that this is all a gift of God our Lord. We are not, that is, to build on another’s foundation getting above ourselves in pride and empty boasting, claiming our own the devout feelings of another features of spiritual comfort.

Loyola says that. “In a period of distress we are not to alter anything, but should remain firm and unyielding in our resolutions and the purpose of mind in which we found ourselves on the day preceding such distress, or in the purpose in which we found ourselves in the preceding comfort.”
This is good common sense, when we are in the midst of spiritual static and distress, we should never change a decision or resolution. On the other hand, when we are in the light (feeling Him good), that’s a good time to plan out how we will handle ourselves when we are in the dark (not feeling Him at all).

When you don’t feel him, fight through it. Stay connected during the seasons of static. Rebel against the apathy and indifference. Keep doing the last thing he told you to do. Hold to his word and prayer as your life support during the coma of distress, because joy comes in the morning, your heart will awaken again and His peace will invade your soul.