God, Where Are You?
What to do when you don't feel Him
I saw a sad post the other day, it went something like, ‘I have never felt the presence of God. I don’t know what that’s like. I wish I did. I see people going to church and they obviously feel something, but I don’t.’
Occasionally such posts come with a note of defiance: I have never felt God, therefore He does not exist. With such individuals, it’s not difficult to diagnose why He would stay away from touching such a prideful heart: He shuns the proud and gives grace to the humble.
But this post wasn’t like that. It was more like a cry for help.
And so I wanted to respond to this dear, hurting soul the best I can:
I have felt the presence of God.
I’ve felt both a false thing pretending to be the presence of God, and what I take to be the real thing.
The false thing was a thrilling thing involving the senses, and I found that among the Charismatics and Pentecostals.
It was always a fleeting thing, purely sensate, and nobody could really explain why.
I have an explanation now: it was a counterfeit. It left one wanting more.
The Orthodox Christian Church was, and is, my salvation, a refuge of sanity in an increasingly insane world.
There I have found Christ, and peace, a connection to a deeper reality, a quite different ‘reality’ than the experience before, among the Protestants, of finding a new well, and finding that that well ran dry within a few weeks or months.
Here I have found a limitless well of wisdom and Presence.
Now, it has not always been pleasant. There is a lot of work to do on the soul. I spent well over thirty years sowing sin and corruption into my soul, sometimes unknowingly, but usually with the knowledge that I was doing wrong to myself while not knowing how to stop.
Orthodoxy has led me to sanity. It has led me to mental health.
It is leading me to peace.
I’m not going to say that I’m ‘there’ yet. There is no ‘there’, some mystical state of completeness I can reach on this side of eternity, and thereafter rest on my laurels and accept speaking gigs as a guru for the rest of my life.
There is none of that. There is the narrow path, difficult to find, and there is the daily task of ‘humbling myself under the mighty hand of God’.
There is peace to be found.
I have tasted only a sample of it. How I long for that peace to be deeply planted and rooted, growing, in my heart, so that, as St. Seraphim of Sarov says, ‘thousands around me could be saved.’
If your heart is cold and hard, or you are broken by sin, the Orthodox Christian Church is what you are looking for.
It is the fountain of salvation, for you will be drinking of Jesus Christ Himself.
If you need help locating a canonical Orthodox Church near you, contact me. I’ll be happy to point the way.