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Over the last few weeks, we’ve been looking at the wide variety of experiences that can happen during prayer. That is, we’ve been considering what happens when you close your eyes and are alone with God. One reason for this brief series is that prayer can be such a mystery to people—and I don’t mean the good kind of mystery. Many people believe that everyone else has a rich prayer life and they’re the only ones whose prayer life is dry. Well, everyone’s spiritual life has its ups and downs, dry periods and rich periods, times when it feels like God is close, times when it feels like God is far away, times when it seems like God’s voice is clear, times when it feels like God’s voice is hard to hear. And none of this is surprising. Think of it this way: If you compare your relationship to God to a relationship to a close friend, which is something that can help to clarify things, you’ll realize that any relationship goes through ups and downs. Even your relationship with God.
Your spiritual life can’t always be at a fever pitch of intensity. Even the mystics went through dry periods. So part of the spiritual life is being okay with quiet, being okay with some feelings of distance, being okay with a few days, weeks, or even months of dry times in prayer. It’s part of trusting God, the same way that you would trust a good friend. As a spiritual director once told me, “Even if I don’t hear from my friend, I know she’s still my friend. And even though I don’t feel like I’m hearing from God, I know that God’s there.”
This is so well said and speaks to the heart of what I have been experiencing over the past few weeks. I finished the 19th Annotation exercises with a Spiritual guide in July, and fell back into my old habits almost immediately-limited prayer periods that left me wondering if I were in some sort of spiritual crisis. But God always brings me back to the relationship through messages like this and through everyday occurrences. AMDG.