From Effie

April 2026

When You Believe in God But Can’t Feel Him

You have not stopped believing. Let me say that first.

You are not here because you walked away from God. You are here because you are still standing in the middle of your faith and you cannot feel Him. The prayers leave your mouth and dissolve into the air. The Bible sits open on the table and the words feel flat. Sunday morning comes and goes and nothing inside you stirs the way it used to.

You are not backsliding. You are not failing. You might be in a season of spiritual dryness — what some people call the dark night of the soul — where belief remains but feeling disappears. Elijah knew this place. He called down fire from heaven, watched God move in power, and then ran into the wilderness and asked God to take his life (1 Kings 19:4). Even the strongest faith can walk through a dry season.

If that is where you are, I want you to know: I have been there. And God was still in the room even when I could not feel Him anywhere.

What Spiritual Dryness Actually Feels Like

Nobody warns you about this part of faith.

They tell you about the mountain. They tell you about the breakthrough. They tell you about the moment God shows up and everything changes. And those moments are real — I have had them.

But nobody tells you about the stretches in between. The weeks where your quiet time feels mechanical. The mornings where you pray out of discipline, not desire. The Sundays where everyone around you seems to be feeling something and you are just … there. Present but empty. Believing but dry.

Spiritual dryness does not mean your faith is dying. It might mean your faith is being refined into something that does not depend on feelings to survive. But knowing that does not make it easier to live through.

He was not writing poetry for the sake of it. He was telling God the truth about what it felt like to believe and still feel parched.

When All You Can Do Is Pray

There was a season when my family felt divided in a way I had not expected.

My daughter — brilliant, capable, everything a mother could be proud of — made the decision to leave the country for her education. She had a career set up here. A government job. Security. Everything was in place. But she felt called to something else, and she went against our advice and left for a foreign land where she did not speak the language.

My husband and I watched our small family stretch across an ocean. We watched her struggle with a language barrier that made everything harder. We saw her loneliness and could not fix it. Our family that had always been close suddenly felt scattered, and I could not do a thing about it from here.

That is a kind of spiritual dryness nobody talks about — when your life is not falling apart dramatically, but something essential has shifted and you feel the distance everywhere. In your home. In your prayers. In the quiet that used to feel peaceful but now just feels empty.

All I knew to do was bring it to God. All of it. The worry, the frustration, the helplessness of watching someone you love walk a road you did not choose for them. I dropped it at His feet because I had nowhere else to put it.

You Are Not Standing in a Line

Here is something I want you to hear, because I think a lot of women carry this quietly and never say it out loud.

When God feels far away, it is easy to start believing you are waiting in some kind of line. Like He is busy with someone else’s crisis. Like your prayers are sitting in a pile, and He will get to yours eventually, but not right now. Like you are not urgent enough, not broken enough, not important enough to be heard today.

That is not how God works.

He is not too busy for you. You are not standing in a line waiting for your answer. He orchestrates all of it — every prayer, every need, every quiet cry you send up at 2 AM when you cannot sleep. His timing is not delay. His silence is not neglect. He sees the full picture, and He is working in places you cannot see yet.

I know that because I have lived it. Not because someone preached it to me. Because I have stood in that dry, quiet place where I could not feel Him moving and later — sometimes much later — I saw what He was doing all along.

When Doubt Creeps in While You Wait

Let me be honest about something. Christian doubt and waiting on God often show up together, and the church does not always make room for that.

You can love Jesus and still have questions. You can believe He is sovereign and still wonder why this season is lasting so long. You can trust His character and still feel confused by His methods.

That is not a man who abandoned his faith. That is a man who loved God enough to be honest with Him.

If doubt has crept in during your dry season, you are not disqualified. You are human. And God already knows what you are wrestling with. He is not threatened by your questions. He is waiting for you to bring them to Him instead of carrying them alone.

What to Do When You Cannot Feel Him

I am not going to give you five steps. I do not believe spiritual dryness works that way.

But I will tell you what has carried me through every dry season I have walked through.

Bring everything to Him. Not the cleaned-up version. Not the version you would share at Bible study. The real one. The angry one. The confused one. The one that says, “I know You are there but I cannot feel You and I do not know what to do with that.”

Drop it at His feet. Not halfway. All the way. The worry you keep picking back up — put it down. The outcome you keep trying to control — release it. The answer you keep demanding on your schedule — let it go.

And then do not stop praying.

Not because the prayer changes God’s mind. Because the prayer changes yours. It keeps you tethered to Him when your feelings would have you drift. It keeps you in the conversation even when the conversation feels one-sided.

Being still is not doing nothing. Being still is choosing to stop striving, stop fixing, stop running ahead of God — and letting Him be God in the places you have been trying to manage on your own.

He Has Not Left the Room

If you are in a season where you believe in God but cannot feel Him, I want you to know this: He has not left. The silence is not absence. The dryness is not punishment. And the fact that you are still here — still praying, still reading, still searching for something to hold onto — that is faith. Real faith. The kind that costs something.

You do not need to perform your way back into God’s presence. You are already in it. You do not need to earn the feeling. The feeling will come or it will not, but His faithfulness is not measured by what you feel. It is measured by who He is.

He values you. He hears you. He is not too busy and you are not too small. You are not standing in a line. You are standing before a God who has already turned His face toward you.

Stay. Even in the dry season. Even in the quiet.

He is still here. And so are you.

With love,

Effie