"I don't feel God."

“But I don’t feel God.”

I’ve heard these words come from the mouths of so many people, so many Christians and non-Christians alike; even myself. It feels like God isn’t there. It feels like you must be doing something wrong. It feels like maybe God isn't real, then.

What about when you just don’t feel God? 

God is not a feeling.

Hear me out: “I don’t feel God” are valid words and is a valid concern. But it is important to remember in our feeling-oriented culture that God, and thus Love (in 1 John 4:8 it says that “God is love”), is a Person to be known and not a feeling to be pursued. Feelings come and go; God does not.

If you pursue God only when you feel like it, your love of Him (and your experience of His love for you) will be incomplete.

In a typical love relationship, there are two parts to being in love: falling in love, and staying in love. One is an ouflow; one is a choice. One is much easier; one is much harder. Both are necessary. Any healthy, strong and loving relationship must be pursued in and out of season, when one feels like loving and when one doesn’t.

When two people are together, there are two parts of the relationship: the dating/honeymoon phase, and then the rest of their married life. When people only invest in the first part, the part that is admittedly easier - the “falling” in love part - what does that so often result in? 

Divorce.**

Because the two people haven’t made love a commitment, only a feeling.**

In those moments we can’t feel God, those periods we feel “dry,” I think we would do well to see these relationship dynamics in our relationship with God. There is the moment you fall in Love with Him, and the moments you fall in Love all over again...and then there are moments when you feel no love, but you must force yourself to love and pursue relationship.

I know that may sound totalitarian, forcing yourself to love, but it is actually when love is made most true. A relationship based on feeling is unhealthy, immature, and incomplete. If we pursue love in our relationship with God as a feeling, it will only last so long. We have to love, we have to pray, we have to read the Bible and worship and trust even when it is the last thing we want to do and the hardest demand on the list. And I’m finding that the times I least feel like pursuing Jesus in love are actually the moments I need to most.

So what do we do when we don’t feel God?

C.S. Lewis has some interesting thoughts from Mere Christianity to end with. 

       “The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’   
       your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets.  
       When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.” 

When you don’t feel like God’s there, when you don’t feel like pursuing relationship with Him, I want to encourage you to pursue Him anyway. A lot of times, the feeling of love will follow the action of love. And in the dry periods, remember: God is just as amazing and worth pursuing in the moments you don’t feel Him as He is in the moments you do.

**Please understand that I am by no means suggesting that this is the reason for every divorce.

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Taylor Fohr

Taylor is a recent high school graduate headed to UCF. She loves running and being active, sitting in coffee shops but drinking tea, music, other cultures, good conversations, hard questions, and getting to know people. Taylor is a part of University Carillon United Methodist Church, where she works in the children's and youth ministries and also plays piano/keys in the worship band. Though she has not decided what she wants to study, she plans on spending her next few years doing whatever it is God wants her to (which, she hopes, includes lots of traveling).

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