Feeling Spiritually Dry — A Letter for the Long Silence
⏱ 10 min read
Sister, in the long silence,
I am writing this on the assumption that you did not arrive here lightly. The phrase you typed into the search bar — feeling spiritually dry — is not the phrase of the curious. It is the phrase of the woman who has been quietly walking through a stretch of God’s silence for longer than she has admitted to anyone, and who has finally opened a search bar at eleven on a Tuesday night because she could not carry it alone for one more day.
I am not going to begin this letter with the verse most articles begin with. You have already prayed that verse. You have already had it given to you by a friend who did not understand the size of the silence. I am not going to tell you the dryness is a gift. I do not know if it is. What I know is what the dryness is, and what the practice for the inside of it can look like, and what holds when the feelings are gone for a long time.
This is a letter for the long silence. The one that has lasted longer than a season. The one where you have, more than once, wondered if you simply made the whole thing up, and the wondering itself has become part of the weight.
First, the silence is real
I want to say this clearly before any practice or counsel. The silence is real. It is not a measurement error. It is not a sign of insufficient faith. It is not the consequence of some unconfessed sin you cannot locate. The fact that you cannot feel God right now is a real fact about your interior, and it is allowed to be named exactly that way.
The Christian tradition has known this stretch for two thousand years. The desert mothers and fathers called it aridity. John of the Cross called it the dark night. The Psalmist asked how long, O Lord, will you forget me forever and did not get an answer in the next verse. The silence has a name in scripture and a long list of saints who walked it before you. You are not the first. You are not broken. You are in a stretch the people who knew God most deeply have all walked.
That is the first thing I needed to say. Before any practice.
A small thing for your body
Before you read on, set whatever is in your hands down for a minute. Notice the shoulders. They have probably been holding the dryness for months — pulled in slightly, braced, the upper back gone hard the way it goes hard when a person has been doing emotional work that no one is helping with.
Let them drop. Just an inch. Not to perform peace. Just to give the body one minute of not being the carrier of the weight by itself.
The dryness is not in the shoulders. But the carrying of the dryness has been. Let the shoulders come down. The next sentence is here when you are ready.
What the dryness is not
It is not punishment. God does not withdraw to punish the daughter who is honestly seeking Him. That theology has the wrong God in it. The God of the gospel is the one who runs to meet the prodigal while she is still a long way off — not the God who hides from her on the road home.
It is not evidence that the faith was never real. The faith that does not survive a feeling-less stretch was indeed only a feeling. The faith that survives a dry year — and you are surviving it; you are reading this — is the kind of faith scripture itself describes. Job did not feel God on the ash heap and was named a man of righteousness. The Psalmist did not feel God and wrote into your hand I commit my spirit anyway. The feeling-less faith is not the lesser faith. It is the harder one and the more durable one, and you are inside it.
It is not, usually, your fault. Most dry seasons arrive in the lives of women who have not changed anything about how they were practising their faith. The silence comes. It does not announce why. The reasons, when they eventually become visible — and sometimes they do not — are often not about us at all. They are about the kind of trust the next part of the life is going to require, which has to be built underneath the level of feeling, and which can only be built when the feelings are temporarily turned down.
What the small daily practice for the dry stretch looks like
You will not pray your way out of this in a week. I am not going to give you a five-step plan that promises to. What I am going to give you is the small daily practice that has held women through dry stretches that lasted a year, two years, more. It is gentler than the practice you used to keep, and it does less work in the moment, and it is built for exactly this terrain.
Three small things. Each day. None of them require the dryness to lift.
The verse you can hold without arguing with it. Not the verse that promises the feeling will come back. Not the verse that demands a response you cannot give. The verse you can sit with quietly even on the day God feels gone. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. Be still, and know that I am God. Even there your hand will guide me. One. Written out at the top of the page. Read once a day. Not for insight. For company.
The honest sentence. Below the verse, one sentence. The truest sentence about today. Today the silence is still there. Today I did not feel Him but I did not stop reading. Today the dryness is heavier than it was last week. I do not know why. The sentence is not for solving. The sentence is for being a person who has not pretended.
The closing line. One sentence, the same one, every day. Lord, I am still here. I am still Yours. I cannot feel You. I am keeping coming. Write it out by hand, even on the days you do not believe it as you write it. The writing is the prayer the feeling cannot manage. The hand carries the prayer the heart is too tired to.
Three sentences. Two to five minutes. Done. The whole practice on the days when you have nothing.
Pause for a second time
Notice where the body is now. Heavy, probably. The dry season often sits in the chest and the head — a heaviness that has nothing to do with what happened today, that is the residue of the long silence sitting in the body.
Feel the chest receive the weight of the body. Do not try to lift it. The lift is His. The being-here, with the heaviness, is yours. Just stay for a minute. Nothing has to change.
That is the second small body movement. Two minutes of letting the body be held by what it is sitting on — the chair, the floor, the bed, the ground. The dryness does not get smaller. The carrying gets a moment of rest.
What Murray named about the surrender for this stretch
Andrew Murray, writing in Absolute Surrender, named the posture for the soul who has run out of her own resources and has finally come to the place where there is nothing left to bring except the willingness to be where she is, with God:
“It asks you whether, so far as you have come to dwell with it and taste its blessedness, it has not done well by you. And with a divine authority, mingled with such an inexpressible tenderness that one might almost think he heard the tone of reproach in it, it says, ‘Soul, as the Father hath loved me, so I have loved you: abide in my love.’ Surely there can be but one answer to such pleading: Lord Jesus Christ! here I am. Henceforth Thy love shall be the only home of my soul: in Thy love alone will I abide. That love is not only the motive, but also the measure, of our surrender to abide in it.”
— Andrew Murray, Absolute Surrender
Read that again, slowly. Lord Jesus Christ! here I am. That is the entire prayer the dry season is teaching you. Not the eloquent prayer. Not the prayer with petitions stacked. The single, plain, here I am. It is the prayer of the woman who has nothing else left, and who has discovered, slowly, that nothing else left is itself a kind of arrival.
The dryness is, sometimes, the thing that strips the soul down to the version of this prayer that has no decoration. Here I am. Not with the feeling. Not with the answer. Not with the testimony. Just here. The surrender Murray is describing is not a one-time event. It is the daily here I am that the dry year forces, and that the woman, on the far side of the dry year, can say with a kind of plainness she could not have said before.
What the dryness can do that nothing else can
I will not call the dryness a gift. That language is too quick. What I will say is that the dryness can do a few things that the feeling-rich seasons cannot. Slowly, over time, and not as a reward — just as the side-effect of the long staying.
It can dismantle the part of your faith that was built on the experience of God rather than on God Himself. The experience was good. It was real. It was also vulnerable to weather, and the weather has come. What is left, on the far side, is the part of your faith that was built on Christ Himself — not on what you felt about Him. That part is the part that holds.
It can teach the body the difference between praying because I feel like it and praying because I am Christian. The first is beautiful and the second is durable. The dry stretch is what builds the second. By the time the feelings return — and they will, in some form, eventually — the practice you have built in the dry years will be the floor underneath the rest of your life.
It can return to you, in slow measures, the part of yourself that pretended. Most women, before the dry season, have done a small amount of pretending — saying yes when the answer was I don’t know, singing the song when the heart was elsewhere. The dryness takes the pretending away. You cannot manufacture what the dryness has stripped. The you that emerges is the more honest one, and she will be the one who walks with God for the rest of your life.
A letter does not solve a year
I want to be honest with you. This letter will not lift the dryness. I do not have that to give. What this letter can be — and what I hope it is — is a small piece of evidence that you are not the only woman walking it, that the practice for the inside of it is real, and that the women who have come out the other side are women who, like you, kept coming to the chair on the days God seemed gone. (What to write in a Christian journal when you feel blank is the small daily-prompt companion to this letter, for the mornings when even the three sentences feel like too much. Prayer for anxiety and overthinking is the close cousin for the nights when the dryness is making the anxiety louder.)
If you want the longer practice for the year God goes quiet, when you feel spiritually dry — the practice for the year God goes quiet walks the year-long version of what this letter has opened. And if there is a Christian man in your life who is in the silence too but cannot yet name it, a devotional for spiritual dryness for the Christian man who won’t talk about it is the letter written for him.
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A prayer study guide for the long dry stretch
If the three-sentence practice has taken root and you want the longer companion built specifically for the year God seems quiet, the Stilling Waves Prayer Study Guide for Women: For the Dry Season walks the small daily prayer through the months the feelings do not come.
It was made for exactly this stretch. The verse for each day is short. The page is sized for the practice of being a woman who keeps coming to the chair on the days she has nothing — and the practice is held gently, without ever requiring you to feel different than you do.
Prayer Study Guide for Women: For the Dry Season
With you in the long silence,
The team at Stilling Waves
The Stilling Waves Prayer Study Guide for Women: For the Dry Season holds the small daily prayer through the year God seems quiet — verse pre-printed, three lines for the honest sentence, one closing line that does not require the feeling to come back before the practice does.
