Day 14. When God Seems Distant

Day 14. When God Seems Distant

Since the time Rick Warren wrote his book, it has been revealed that Mother Theresa, everyone’s saint and picture of faith, had doubts!

“I am told God lives in me — and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul,” she wrote at one point. “I want God with all the power of my soul — and yet between us there is terrible separation.” On another occasion she wrote: “I feel just that terrible pain of loss, of God not wanting me, of God not being God, of God not really existing.”

In spite of doubts from the very beginning, Mother Theresa ministered on in faith. Can there be any doubt in our minds that God was with her? What other tiny, withered little person from an obscure village in a tiny realm has moved mountains? We are known by our fruits.

We run a danger when we rely on feelings, physically based feelings. I think those feelings are God’s gift to baby Christians but we soon get over them like lust, then romantic love turn to deep friendship and agape-like love. God moves away from a physically-based feeling. It makes sense. Physically-based feelings are an attachment like an addiction. God will not allow us to become attached to Him or we would loose our free will. God wants us to love Him of our own volition, not by some addictive attachment. Mother Theresa loved him by faith, faith alone although sometimes she didn’t understand it.

But we have some Old Testament saints that did. Warren quotes Job: “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. But he knows the way that I take;” (Job 23:8-10a, NRSV).

There is another saint, Jeremiah, sitting on the rubble heaps that were once Jerusalem, a time to loose faith if ever there was one, who says, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The LORD is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”" (Lamentations 3:22-24a, NRSV)

When we experience the darkness of the soul, when we feel abandoned, we need to recall the unchanging nature of God, “the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end. Great is thy faithfulness.”

Hope in Him!

Rick