🕊️ I Love God, But I Couldn’t Feel Him Anymore
A Faith-Rooted Guide to Healing Spiritual Exhaustion - Part 5 of The 7 Faces of Exhaustion™ Summer Series
“You haven’t lost your faith…you’ve exhausted it.”
Here’s the difference and how God meets you in the silence you’re afraid to talk about.
When God Felt Silent
This is difficult to share especially since I didn’t stop believing. It wasn’t like I woke up one morning and decided God wasn’t real. There was no dramatic crisis of faith or theological argument that shook my foundation.
My faith didn’t shatter. It just went quiet. Like a fire that nobody put out, but nobody fed either. One day I looked up and realized the flame was barely flickering.
I still went to church and volunteered to lead a women’s Bible study group. I knew that I still loved Jesus and I still said “God is good” when people asked how I was doing. But inside? Inside I was standing in a room where God used to speak, and that room was now empty.
I remember that time I tried to pray and nothing came to me to share with the Lord. It wasn’t about resistance and there was no doubt. There simply was just… nothing.
I opened my mouth and the words that used to flow like water sat in my throat and my tongue felt heavy. I didn’t know what to say anymore. The prayers that used to sustain me felt like scripts I was reading for a play I’d already performed a thousand times.
My Bible sat on on my bed and I would just move it aside before I went to sleep. And when I woke up, I would put it behind my pillow after making my bed. Not because I didn’t want to read it, but because every time I had opened it, the words blurred together. I’d read a verse I’d loved for twenty years and feel nothing.
Not comfort.
Not conviction.
Not even familiarity.
Just words on a page. So I just gave up.
And as for worship songs? The ones that used to make me weep with gratitude? I would stand in the congregation with my hands up and my mouth barely moving. The feeling was like amnesia of the songs washing over me, as I watched everyone else lift their arms and wondering what was wrong with me that I couldn’t feel what they were feeling.
I was going through the motions of a faith that had stopped moving inside of me.
And why wouldn’t I have felt that way?
The Moment My Faith Faded
Well, here’s what got me to that place in my spiritual walk.
It happened the Monday morning after Easter. I had served at five of our church’s nine Easter services that weekend.
I attended the Good Friday service for my own edification. Served for three services on Saturday. And two more on Sunday.
And I loved every single minute of it.
I greeted. I smiled. I pointed people toward open seats and offered tissues to the ones who cried when the choir sang. I watched families reunite, children and adults dressed in their ‘Sunday’ best, and people meet Jesus for the very first time.
It was holy work. I enjoyed the Spiritual exhaustion that became everything I wanted to give.
And then Easter Sunday came to an end.
By 2pm, I turned to my husband and asked him to cancel our brunch reservation at one of my favorite restaurants. Not postpone. Cancel. I had nothing left. I was at full capacity.
We decided to pick up Italian deli sandwiches from our favorite local spot, came home, and I put on my cozy fuzzy pants. You know the ones. The pants that say, “I am officially done being a person today.”
By 4pm, we were both fighting to keep our eyes open.
“We must be getting old,” my husband laughed.
“It’s not old,” I said with a half smile. “It’s empty.”
✝️ “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.”
— Matthew 11:28
Here’s the thing no one talks about after Easter…the crash.
We spend weeks preparing.
We fast.
We pray.
We serve.
We show up with everything we’ve got and we should. Resurrection Sunday deserves our full hearts and our open hands.
Now, the very next thing that happens Monday comes, the sanctuary is now empty and I immediately pack away my decorations. And after all of that, I’m then off to prepare for the women’s ministry event. Mind you when I signed up, I had informed them that I would not be available on a regular basis.
However, I didn’t allow myself to say ‘no.’
And to think I also wanted to join the praise and worship team. Then, a light bulb moment happened. I realized that during all of this is, that my form of worship was doing as much as I could for the Lord, any way possible. Yet, I was becoming spiritually bankrupt by not allowing myself to be fed spiritually.
And I began to feel guilty about it.
The guilt led to what seemed like endless crying, because it seemed like one more thing just led to another until I simply gave up. I was eventually all cried out.
I wasn’t angry at God.
I wasn’t running from God.
I was sitting in the same room with God and couldn’t hear His voice, because I kept ‘doing.’
After all that I had been ‘giving,’ His promises seemed empty when I could no longer hear His voice. And that silence was the loneliest thing I had ever experienced.
That wasn’t backsliding. That was Spiritual exhaustion. And it was terrifying because nobody talks about it in church.
When Your Feelings Tell You Otherwise…
“If your faith were stronger, you wouldn’t feel this way.”
“You must have unconfessed sin. That’s why God feels distant.”
“Real Christians don’t get tired of God.”
“You just need to pray more, read more, serve more. Try harder.”
These are the whispers. And every single one of them is a lie.
Spiritual exhaustion is not a faith failure.
It’s not punishment.
It’s not God withdrawing because you didn’t perform well enough.
It’s the result of a soul that has been pouring out spiritually, through service, intercession, ministry, caregiving, and crisis after crisis, without ever being intentionally refueled.
And the terror you feel about admitting it? That’s not conviction. That’s shame dressed up as theology, telling you that exhaustion with God means abandonment by God. It doesn’t. It never has.
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This Is What’s Really Happening Inside You
Spiritual exhaustion is not apostasy.
It’s not doubt.
It’s not the result of weak faith or hidden sin.
It’s the predictable consequence of a soul that has been giving out more than it has been taking in, spiritually, emotionally, and relationally with God, for an extended period of time.
A.W. Tozer, the beloved pastor and author of The Pursuit of God, wrote extensively about the difference between knowing about God and knowing God. He warned that the greatest danger in the Christian life is not losing faith but domesticating it.
Reducing a living relationship to a series of habits, rituals, and obligations that no longer touch the heart. When your Bible reading feels mechanical and your prayers feel rehearsed, it’s not because the Spirit has left. It’s because somewhere along the way, intimacy got replaced by routine.
St. John of the Cross, the 16th-century Carmelite mystic, gave this experience its most enduring name “the dark night of the soul.” Contrary to how the phrase is commonly used, he didn’t describe it as God’s absence.
He described it as a painful but purposeful process in which God strips away the comfortable, familiar ways we’ve experienced Him in order to draw us into a deeper, more mature faith. The dark night isn’t God leaving. It’s God renovating. Tearing down the walls of a faith that was too small to hold what He wants to build next.
Henri Nouwen, the Dutch Catholic priest and author of The Inner Voice of Love, wrote from inside his own spiritual collapse. After years of prolific ministry, he experienced a period of such profound spiritual desolation that he questioned everything he had taught others.
His journals from that season reveal a man who loved God desperately and couldn’t feel God at all. Nouwen’s honesty gave permission to generations of believers to admit: I am with God and I am empty at the same time. Those two things can coexist.
Dr. Ruth Haley Barton, founder of the Transforming Center and author of Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, has spent her career studying spiritual depletion in leaders and ordinary believers alike.
She identifies a pattern she calls “danger zones” of spiritual leadership: doing for God without being with God. Serving out of obligation rather than overflow. Performing spiritual activity while starving spiritually.
Her work confirms what you already feel, you can be active in the faith and starving in your soul at the same time.
What Spiritual Exhaustion Looks Like in Your Life
You open your Bible and feel nothing. The words you once loved feel flat, distant, or irrelevant.
You pray, but it feels like talking to the ceiling. You wonder if God is listening, or if He’s stopped answering.
You go to church out of habit, not hunger. You sit in the pew and feel like an outsider in your own faith community.
Worship songs that used to move you to tears now make you feel guilty because you can’t connect with them.
You avoid conversations about God because you don’t want anyone to know how empty you feel.
You serve, lead, pray for others, and perform all the expected spiritual activities while feeling completely hollow inside.
You feel alone in a room full of believers. And the loneliness is unbearable.
David knew this place. In Psalm 22:1–2 he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.”
David wasn’t backsliding. He was the man after God’s own heart, and he felt abandoned by the God he loved.
He named it.
He wrote it down.
He didn’t clean it up or make it sound more spiritual.
He let the ache sit on the page uncensored.
And what’s so remarkable is that God didn’t remove those words from Scripture. He preserved them. He made sure that every spiritually exhausted believer who came after David would find their own cry in his psalm and know this has always been part of the journey.
You are not the first person to love God and feel alone with Him.
What God Says When Your Soul Is Running on Fumes
The Permission to Be Honest with God
✝️ “How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart?” — Psalm 13:1–2
This is a prayer of spiritual exhaustion, and it’s in the Bible. David didn’t pray politely. He didn’t pretend everything was fine. He asked God directly…how long? Will you forget me forever? And God honored that raw, unfiltered honesty by making it part of His Word.
If David could say this to God and remain “a man after God’s own heart,” then you can bring your emptiness to God without fear that He’ll reject you for it.
The Promise That Drought Has a Purpose
✝️ “Blessed is the one who trusts in the LORD, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.” — Jeremiah 17:7–8
Notice the tree planted by the water still experiences drought. The promise isn’t that drought won’t come. It’s that your roots go deep enough to survive it. Spiritual exhaustion feels like drought. Dry, barren, fruitless.
But the roots you’ve planted over years of faith don’t disappear because the surface feels empty. They’re doing their deepest work right now, reaching further down into the water source you can’t see.
The Invitation to Return, Not Perform
✝️ “Return to me, and I will return to you.” — Malachi 3:7
Seven words.
No conditions.
No prerequisites.
No “clean yourself up first” or “prove you’re sorry enough.”
Just return. Come back.
Not to a program.
Not to a service schedule.
Not to a performance of faith.
Return to Me. God’s invitation to the spiritually exhausted soul is not “try harder.” It’s “come home.”
🌿Five Steps Back to Breathing Again
This isn’t a “5 Steps to Fix Yourself” list. This is an invitation to breathe.
Today, I invite you to pick one. Only one. You deserve to ‘breathe’ again.
Step 1: Stop Performing Your Faith and Start Feeling It
Spiritual exhaustion often hides behind religious activity. You serve, you pray, you show up, but none of it is feeding you anymore. It’s all output. Zero intake.
The first step is admitting that what you’ve been doing isn’t working. Not because God isn’t real, but because the way you’ve been connecting with Him has become performance instead of presence.
🌿 Try this: This week, take one spiritual activity off your plate. Not forever, just for now. If you’re leading a Bible study that drains you, let your group know that you need to step back for a week.
If your prayer time has become a rigid obligation, skip the structure and just sit in silence with God for five minutes.
If you were going to volunteer for ‘yet another weekend,’ allow yourself to ’pass’ on that event or cause.
NOTE: The Lord won’t give you more than you can handle, however you cannot give from an empty cup.’
Step 2: Give Yourself Permission to Be in the Desert
The desert is not a punishment. In Scripture, it’s a pattern.
Moses spent 40 years in the desert before God spoke from the burning bush.
Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
Elijah walked 40 days to Horeb.
The desert is where God does some of His deepest work, but only if you stop trying to escape it and start trusting that He brought you here on purpose.
🌿 Try this: Write this sentence in your journal: “I am in a spiritual desert, and I trust that God is here with me even when I can’t feel Him.” Read it every morning this week. Let it be enough.
Step 3: Change the Way You Come to God
If your Bible reading has become mechanical, stop reading the way you’ve always read. If your prayers feel rehearsed, stop praying the way you’ve always prayed.
Spiritual exhaustion is often a sign that your current practices have outgrown your current season. The way you connected with God ten years ago may not be the way He’s inviting you to connect with Him now.
🌿 Try this: Instead of your usual Bible reading plan, open to just one Psalm, and read it slowly, three times. Don’t study it. Don’t look up commentary. Just let one phrase land.
Or try writing a letter to God in your journal. Let God surprise you with a new way to hear Him.
Step 4: Find a Safe Person to Tell the Truth To
Spiritual exhaustion thrives in isolation. As long as you keep performing faith publicly while starving privately, the gap between who you appear to be and who you actually are will keep growing.
You need that one person, who can hear you say “I can’t feel God right now.”
This one person is the one who will listen without trying to fix you, quote a verse at you, or panic.
🌿 Try this: Think of the one person who loves God and has the maturity to hold space for your honesty.
Not the person who will give you a reading plan. The person who will say, “Me too,” or “I’m not going anywhere.”
Reach out this week.
Step 5: Let God Love You Without Your Performance
This is the hardest step because it strikes at the root of spiritual exhaustion. The belief that God’s love is connected to your spiritual output.
That He loves you more when you pray longer, serve harder, and read more chapters. Please know that is a lie.
God’s love is not a reward for your performance. It is the foundation underneath your existence.
🌿 Try this: Tonight, before you sleep, don’t pray. Don’t read. Don’t do anything spiritual. Just lie still and say this one sentence: “God, I have nothing to offer You tonight…and You love me anyway.”
Then be quiet.
Let the truth be enough.💛
A Prayer for the Woman Whose Faith Feels Empty
Father God
I don’t know how to pray right now. The words that used to come so easily have dried up, and I’m standing in a silence I didn’t choose and don’t understand.
I haven’t stopped believing in You. But I’ve stopped feeling You. And the gap between what I know in my head and what I feel in my heart is wider than it’s ever been.
I confess that I’ve been performing my faith instead of living it. I’ve shown up for everyone else’s spiritual needs while ignoring my own. I’ve been so busy doing things for You that I forgot how to just be with You.
I’m tired, Lord. Not the kind of tired sleep fixes. The kind that sits in my soul and makes everything feel gray.
But I’m here. That has to count for something. I’m turning around. I’m coming back. Not with a polished prayer or a perfect heart. Just with what I have left, which isn’t much.
You said if I return to You, You’ll return to me. I’m holding You to that promise tonight. Not because I’ve earned it, but because You made it.
Meet me in this desert. I’ll wait here until You do.
In Jesus’ name, Amen. 🙏🏼
Remember This Truth
Silence is not abandonment.
Drought is not punishment.
And a soul that has been pouring out for everyone else until it runs dry is not a soul that has failed God. It’s a soul God is waiting to refill.
You haven’t lost your faith. You’ve exhausted it. And that is not the same thing.
The fire isn’t gone. It’s waiting.
And the God who lit it the first time is more than capable of lighting it again.
Your Invitation to Feel God Again
If this is where you are right now, loving God and unable to feel Him, going through the motions and starving inside, terrified to admit it because nobody in your circle talks about this, I want you to know that you are not backsliding.
You are not failing.
You are not being punished.
You are a woman whose soul has been pouring out for so long that it has finally run dry.
And God is not angry about that. He’s waiting to refill you.
Our God is a good God…Hallelujah!🙌🏼
I pray that this message resonated with you or someone you would like to share this with. I’d love to hear from you so, will you do one thing for me? Hit reply or leave a comment and tell me:
🤔 “When was the last time you felt ‘alive’ after coming out of a season of spiritual exhaustion?”
You don’t have to explain what happened. Just name the season. Sometimes remembering when it was alive is the first step toward finding your way back.
You are not alone in this desert.
And this is not where your story ends.
Joyfully yours,
A gentle note: I’m not a physician, therapist, or licensed counselor. I’m a woman of faith who’s walked through exhaustion and found her way back to joy. What I share here comes from my own journey and the wisdom of Scripture, not medical advice. If you’re experiencing ongoing fatigue or mental health struggles, please reach out to a trusted healthcare provider. What I offer is encouragement from one who’s been there, and a reminder that you’re not alone. 💛
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