I’ve been a bit off lately.
I’m not sleeping well, I’ve struggled to focus and my prayer life has felt dry. While my days seem repetitive and dull, my mind and heart feel agitated and disconnected. It wasn’t until I went on a solitude retreat that God helped me pinpoint why I wasn’t feeling like myself.
We all experience seasons of feeling down. Sometimes life is just hard and we can easily identify what’s wrong. Other times though, we can’t quite put our finger on it.
In this post, I’ll discuss a few different reasons for feeling off/disconnected/sad and how we can distinguish between them. None of what you’ll fine below is easy, but as we find context for our apathy, sadness or spiritual disconnection, we can partner with God to find some relief and perspective. Sometimes, just normalizing our experience is a great help, so I hope these categories can help shed some light if you’re feeling stuck. Keep pressing on, friends! 🙂
Depression
“My eye grows dim through sorrow.
Every day I call upon you, O Lord;
I spread out my hands to you.”
Psalm 88:9
Depression might be the most commonly understood and diagnosed reason for feeling down. Nearly 18 million adults experience depression in any given year. Depression can be due to circumstances (weather, relational problems, job stress, etc.), grief or chemical imbalances in the brain. It can last for a short season or it can be a lifelong journey. Thankfully due to increasing awareness about mental health issues, more resources are available today than ever before for those who suffer from depression.
- Common Characteristics: Sadness, hopelessness, anxiety, irritability, a loss of interest in things you used to enjoy, trouble eating and sleeping, lethargy and difficulty concentrating.
- Finding the Way Out: Finding the help you need begins with self-advocacy. Recognizing you do not feel like yourself and telling someone about it is your first step towards getting back on solid ground. Of course, prayer and Scripture can be helpful but we can not always pray away clinical depression without taking other necessary steps as well. Here are a few of the components needed to navigate towards healing:
- Support systems: counseling, friends /family to talk to, support groups
- Self-care: good nutrition, sleep, exercise, relational boundaries, etc.
- Spiritual care: reading Scripture, receiving prayer support, talking with a pastor, meeting with a spiritual director, attending church
- Medication. For some, this is the missing piece of the puzzle and can help provide an added layer of stabilization.
The Dark Night of the Soul
“Clouds and thick darkness are all around him;
righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.”
Psalm 97:2
The Dark Night of the Soul is often misunderstood; it deserves its own 5-part series of posts to do it justice! Often people use the term Dark Night to describe a heavy season of life, in order to convey the seriousness of their experience. I will occasionally hear someone say, “I’m really in a dark night right now, life just feels so hard ever since I lost my job.” That, my friends, is not a Dark Night of the Soul. It might be something else listed here, but it’s not how St. John of the Cross would define a Dark Night experience. The Dark Night is an intensely spiritual experience.
There are actually two parts to the Dark Night of the Soul which I will go into below. These two states of being are so complex and nuanced that I highly recommend reading St. John’s writings for yourself to see what resonates most with you. Here’s a link to a free copy online of The Dark Night of the Soul, where John outlines these stages in great detail.
- Dark Night of the Senses
The Dark Night of the Senses involves an intense stripping away of the consolations of God (aka, the “warm fuzzies”) so that you do not have a strong felt sense of God’s presence or the benefits of your relationship with Him. While you still deeply love God and desire Him, you can’t quite feel God’s love for you in return. For many people, the Dark Night of the Senses feels like spiritual abandonment. One easily identifies with Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”(Matt 27:46). You want God, but you can’t find Him. You long for spiritual vitality but everything feels like a vapid desert. While this is a deeply painful process, God is simply taking away the benefits of being in a relationship with Him so that your primary focus is on God, not the things He gives you. As you move through this, you will eventually become reoriented towards Christ in a deeper, more intimate way. Ultimately, the Dark Night is about union with God.
-
- Common Characteristics: No felt sense of God, diminished spiritual vigor, dry prayer life, confusion, strong feelings of spiritual abandonment.
- Finding the way out:
- The way out is God Himself. There is nothing you can do on your own to move forward.
- Be patient and know that God has chosen this road for you because He desires a deeper union with you.
- Stay the course. You will find new levels of intimacy with Christ on the other side.
- A wise mentor told me that during the Dark Night of the Senses, one of the best ways to stay spiritually afloat is, “return to the last thing you were doing when you felt connected God.” If that’s reading the Psalms, keep reading the Psalms. If it was being with your church community, keep seeking fellowship with others. The Dark Night is dark, but Jesus will endure it with you, whether you feel him with you or not.
- Dark Night of the Spirit
The differences between the Dark Night of the Senses and the Dark Night of the Spirit are subtle but important. After you have gone through a Dark Night of the Senses, you may or may not, go through a Dark Night of the Spirit, which St. John of the Cross describes as “a ray of darkness.” The experience itself is difficult and painful, but there is something in you, which has already learned many good lessons in the Dark Night of the Senses, that understands the darkness you feel is for a profound good, namely deeper union with God. This stage looks different for many people: it can be brief and intense or slow and less painful, you might feel God accompanying you in it, or you might not. You might even feel a sense of joy in the pain as God continues to purify your spiritual life. You likely will feel severe temptation and attack from satan as he attempts to use this season to tempt you away from God.- Common Characteristics: Continual spiritual attack from Satan, confrontation with sin and temptation, poverty of spirit, more frequent moments of joy and perspective intertwined with spiritual suffering.
- Finding the way out: This is the same as the Dark Night of the Senses but with an added component of staying alert to spiritual attack and temptation.
Desolation
“Behold, the days are coming,” declares the Lord God,
“when I will send a famine on the land—
not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord.”
Amos 8:11
Spiritual desolation was first recognized by St. Ignatius in his spiritual exercises. In my experience, desolation is a spiritual condition that is relatively temporary – it hits one day and lifts the next. It may last for a week or so but eventually lessens once it is recognized and dealt with. Desolation is often a spiritual category that Christians are not aware of, so simply normalizing this experience can be profoundly helpful.
Desolation is like a micro-Dark Night. It has similar characteristics but is neither as intense nor as long, although still troubling. Desolation is a normal part of the journey. The spiritual heaviness you feel isn’t because you’ve messed up or gotten off track with God. In fact, quite the contrary. God is using it to intensify your longing for Him and refine your character even more.
- Common Characteristics: Loss of energy, agitation/restlessness, disconnection, difficulty sensing God, dry prayer life, spiritual apathy, hopelessness, a focus on earthly things and copious amounts of turning in towards oneself in unproductive introspection.
- Finding the Way Out:
- Embrace a posture of patience
- Confess + renounce any sin you may be harboring
- Continue on in your normals spiritual rhythms. Engage in prayer, the Bible, church and community without disruption, even if you don’t feel like it.
- Pray for the felt consolations of God to return to you.
Spiritual Warfare
“Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion,
seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith, knowing that the same kinds of
suffering are being experienced by your brotherhood throughout the world.”
1 Peter 5: 8-9
I find this category to be one of the most helpful and also one of the least talked about. Spiritual warfare can happen on its own or in combination with any of the other categories, causing massive disorientation. Satan is a real enemy who brings real problems to our doorstep (Eph 6:12). His methods are often covert and barely recognizable, but if we remain on guard, we can spot evil’s activity and shut it down in the name of Jesus. God allows Satan’s schemes to sift us and refine our character, which is always for our good (Luke 22:31), and ultimately, this turns evil on its head.
- Common Characteristics: Events in life being thwarted, unexplained dysregulation of emotions, physical ailments (headaches, fatigue, muscle cramps, minor and inconvenient injuries), reoccurring negative thoughts, disrupted sleep cycle, conflict with others. Many have a felt sense of oppression or heaviness on them and others can specifically feel a dark presence.
- Finding the Way Out: The work of darkness cannot stand the light of Christ (John 1:5). Banishing the kingdom of darkness is part of the authority you have in Christ (Mark 6:7). Thankfully, this is an easy process to engage in! James 4:7 says, “Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.” To this end, warding off evil begins with realigning with Jesus through prayer and Scripture, followed by praying against evil. Here is a simple prayer I use:
- “Jesus I submit myself to your authority. Thank you that my life is found in you, my Savior. I align myself with you and I pray against Satan in your name. Satan, in the name of Jesus, you must flee. I resist you in the name of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Be gone.”
- Scripture makes it clear that specific spirits can harass people (Mark 9:25, Luke 13:11, Mark 5:1, 9), so it can be helpful to specifically name and rebuke any spirits that you can identify (for instance, perhaps a spirit of anxiety or fear has been nagging you).
The Wall
And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.”
And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing:
go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure
in heaven; and come, follow me.” Disheartened by the saying, he went away
sorrowful, for he had great possessions.
Mark 10:20-22
Pain is vital to spiritual formation. Without breaking, there is no growth. In terms of spiritual growth, there are many models we can look at to provide a map or outline of progression. I personally like The Critical Journey by Hagberg and Guelich. While the spiritual journey is too dynamic to fit into orderly or linear stages, The Critical Journey lays out an excellent framework for progression through our spiritual life.
The Wall is one of the most important stages to understand. We all hit The Wall at some point or another in our spiritual life. Rather than seeing it as a roadblock, we are invited to see it as a marker of progress toward a deeper union with Christ. The rich young ruler in Mark 10 had a painful decision to make in order to leave his former way of life and join Jesus in a new way. That same invitation is offered to us as we reach The Wall. When we reach it, God will ask, “are you ready to move beyond yourself and join me on a new path?”
- Common Characteristics: The Wall can be triggered by circumstance, grief, disruption in our church community, or simply God’s timing. It is marked by struggle, frustration, anger and unrest. Many people reach this point after a prolonged season of responsibility, leadership, serving in ministry or upholding rigid doctrine and legalism.
- Finding the Way Out:
- The first step through The Wall is to surrender to God and lay down your preconceived notions about your spiritual life. Get curious about why you encountered The Wall when you did and stay close to Jesus as he leads you onward.
- Try to view The Wall as a great mercy. If you’re able to see it as an invitation from God, you can engage Him and your spiritual life in a new way.
- Don’t give up! The only way out is through. You can’t bypass The Wall. You can’t dig under it or try to climb over it. It must be confronted and worked through. Many people, in their journeys, get stuck here and never progress beyond The Wall which is such a shame because great things await them on the other side!
Shedding the False Self
“to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life
and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit
of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God
in true righteousness and holiness.” Ephesians 4:22-24
This is a painful sanctifying process that has deep implications for our daily life. As we go through life, we learn ways of relating to others and presenting ourselves to the world which is largely influenced by people’s reactions to us. We alter our interests, personality, facial expressions, words, goals and actions to meet the desires of others and gain positive feedback. The result is an attachment to insecure props that become the false self – a way of being and living that is not congruent who God has called us to be in Christ.
As life goes on, God calls us to shed our false self and put on the new self. This process involves a somber confrontation with sin, our inauthentic styles of relating and the distorted ways we present ourselves to the world.
- Common Characteristics: For many, this can resemble a mid-life crisis where we ask, “who am I? why do I always act that way? what does God want me to do with my life? I feel like I don’t know who I am anymore!” We become very aware of our blindspots, imperfections, sin and become increasingly frustrating with ourselves. Many people have a profound sense of being “stuck” with no way out. Temptation and spiritual attack can ramp up as Satan senses you beginning to step towards who God created you to be.
- Finding the Way Out: Submit yourself to the sanctification of God and release the things that He calls you to let go of. As you do, you will make room for your true self, which is who you were made to be as you love God and love others. Trust the process, friends.
Wounding
I have seen his ways, but I will heal him;
I will lead him and restore comfort to him and his mourners,
creating the fruit of the lips.
Peace, peace, to the far and to the near,” says the Lord,
“and I will heal him.”
Isaiah 57:18-19
We all have formative wounds that we have incurred: a distant parent, the loss of your first relationship, traumatic accidents, loss, harsh words spoken by someone you trusted – the possibilities are endless. To protect these wounds, we develop armor. “I will never be hurt like that again,” we say. As the years go on, our armor rusts and we become beholden to our wounds the ways we protect ourselves. To complicate matters, Satan often uses our wounds and coping mechanisms as strategic areas to attack which can be disorienting.
- Common Characteristics: unhealthy coping, destructive patterns, addiction, anxiety, outbursts of danger, volatile emotions, toxic relationships, shame, insecurity, inability to face God.
- Finding the Way Out: Truly, the only way out of this is by allowing your story to be held by another. This is not a solo endeavor. No amount of journaling, self-help books or retreats/conferences will help. Sharing the story of your original wounding and subsequent present-day pain with another person is the key to freedom. Here are a few options to consider:
- Counseling
- Inner Healing Prayer
- Meeting with a Stephen Minister, pastor or friend
- Story groups or support groups where people take turn sharing their stories
