Episode 106: Has God Forgotten Me? When Faith Feels Loud and God Feels Silent

There is a question many faithful women carry that they will not say out loud. It surfaces at two in the morning, in the carpool line, in the middle of the worship song everyone else seems to feel.

Has God forgotten me?

If you are still praying, still serving, still showing up — and God feels silent anyway — this episode is for you.

Here is what you will walk away with:

• Why God's silence often feels like rejection — even when nothing has actually changed between you and God.
• What researchers studying spiritual dryness have learned about how common this is among the most devoted believers.
• How dryness shows up in your body, your mind, and your relationships — and why that matters.

SCRIPTURE HIGHLIGHT: Psalm 13:1–2 (NIV)

Research note: Spiritual dryness research from Büssing and colleagues at Witten/Herdecke University, and attachment to God research from Beck and McDonald.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi there. You are listening to your next best step. I'm Coach Janet J, and today's episode is for the woman who is still showing up faithfully and still wondering where God has gone. If that is anywhere close to where you are right now, this one is for you. There's a question many faithful women carry that they will not say out loud. It happens at two in the morning, it happens in the carpool line. It happens in the middle of a worship song that everyone else seems to feel. Has God forgotten me? This experience has a name, and the research behind it may change how you read the silence. There are spiritual struggles women feel comfortable bringing to Bible study. I'm working on patience. I need to trust God more. Those phrases fit in a prayer request. Has God forgotten me? Does not fit. It feels dangerous. It feels like the kind of sentence someone in the pew next to you would rush to correct before they comfort you. So many of us have learned to translate our pain into something more acceptable before bringing it to God. Instead of, God, I feel abandoned. We say, Lord, help me trust your timing. Instead of, God, I am exhausted from asking. We say, your will be done. Those are real, true statements. And God is not asking you to polish your pain before bringing it to Him. The honest version is also the welcome version. Psalm 13 opens with a sentence so raw, it almost feels out of place in a Bible. David writes, and these are his words, not mine. How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? That is ache, plain and unfiltered. That is a faithful man asking God if he has been forgotten. Notice what God did with that prayer. He didn't edit it out of scripture. He did not say, David, that sounds dramatic. Rewrite this when your faith looks better. He kept it. He kept it in the Bible for generations of his people to pray when they did not know what else to say. That tells us something important. God is not offended by an honest question. He has actually been making room for that kind of question for a very long time. Researchers have a name for the experience of feeling spiritually empty, distant from God, or unable to access the closeness you once felt. They call it spiritual dryness. A research team led by Arnt Busing at Witten Herdicke University in Germany has spent more than a decade studying this. Their 2013 study, published in Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, examined 425 Catholic priests, men whose entire careers were devoted to faith. Forty-six percent reported experiencing spiritual dryness occasionally. 12% reported experiencing it often or regularly. Now before anyone says, well, that's just priests, the same research team studied lay believers next. Their 2016 study in the journal Religions looked at 3,277 non-ordained pastoral workers, regular Christians serving in their parishes, both women and men. 50% reported experiencing spiritual dryness occasionally. 13% often or regularly. And critically, there were no significant differences between women and men, or between age groups. Translation: this experience does not belong to people who are careless about their faith. It is present in measurable numbers among people who have devoted their lives to it. If you feel dry right now, you are not alone and you are not failing at some hidden test. There is more than one piece of research worth knowing. Researchers Richard Beck and Angie McDonnell in the Journal of Psychology and Theology in 2004 looked at something they call attachment to God. They found that people whose nervous systems were wired to fear rejection in close relationships often read God's silence as rejection, even when their faith practices have not changed at all. Which means your body may be interpreting quiet as abandonment. That is a deeply human pattern with a long history and a good explanation. And it certainly does not mean your faith is broken. So let me name what is often underneath this. If your faith feels dry right now, the most likely explanation has more to do with what you are carrying than anything you have done wrong. You may be tired or grieving or holding a load your nervous system cannot keep absorbing. This type of dryness shows up in the lives of women who are caring for parents, raising children, working full-time, supporting a marriage, and being the steady one for everyone else. It shows up after loss. It shows up after disappointment. It shows up when the prayer you have prayed for years has not been answered the way you hoped. More often, this kind of dryness is your spiritual life signaling that you have been carrying more than one person can carry. It is information, not a verdict on your relationship with God. This is one of those topics that touches all four pillars. Spiritually, you may feel a kind of distance from God that hurts in a way you cannot describe. Emotionally, it can stir up grief, fear, loneliness, or a buried kind of abandonment that you do not have words for. Mentally, it pulls you into rumination. You replay every possible reason God might be silent. And physically, it can show up as exhaustion, heaviness, tightness in your chest, restless sleep, or that dragged down feeling of carrying questions you cannot put down. If you are feeling this in more than one of those places at the same time, you are not too sensitive. You are a whole person, and spiritual pain rarely stays in one pillar alone. Here is your next best step today. Let's call it the 30-second tell. When the silence feels loudest at 2 in the morning in the car after a hard conversation, at the kitchen sink, in the moment before bed, set a timer on your phone for 30 seconds. And then tell God the actual truth of what is happening inside of you. Out loud if you can, a whisper works. Even silent words work. One rule, no translation, no making it sound more spiritual than it is. If the truth is I am angry that nothing has changed, say that. Say that for 30 seconds. A time-bounded telling of the truth, short enough to fit into the smallest crack of your day, honest enough to actually matter. And then when the timer beeps, you are done. You did the thing. You brought the real you into the actual presence of God. Instead of leaving the real you outside the door, do it once today. Tomorrow, if the silence comes again, do it again. This is a practice, not a one-time conversation. Three things to carry with you from this episode. The research tells us that spiritual dryness shows up in roughly half of faithful people at one point or another. And your nervous system may be reading silence as rejection, even when nothing has actually changed between you and God. David asked the same question you are asking, and God kept the question in Scripture on purpose. And your next best step is the 30-second tell, a short, repeatable practice of telling God the actual truth unedited in the moment the silence shows up. Silence is not the same as absence, and feeling forgotten is not proof that you are. On Wednesday, we're going to another honest place. For the woman who is loving someone who no longer remembers her. If you are a caregiver or if you love a caregiver, that one's for you. I hope you will be there. Follow or subscribe wherever you are listening or watching so that you don't miss an episode. And if you have a moment of rating a review, makes a real difference. It helps other women find this show, and I am so grateful for everyone. I will see you Wednesday. Take your next best step.