Why God Sometimes Seems Absent

Hope you’re enjoying “America Reads the Bible” week. It’s time the USA got back to The Book–daily.

The other vital spiritual discipline is prayer.

I had a conversation with a friend recently who struggled with “God not answering his prayers.” Here’s a wise perspective.

Why God Sometimes Seems Absent

GUEST ARTICLE

Finally! A Satisfying Answer to Why God Sometimes Seems Absent

By Robin Schumacher

Christians love to talk about feeling God’s presence, especially in the highs and the lows. But there’s a quieter, more uncomfortable reality most believers don’t volunteer: the moments when God feels nowhere to be found … right when you need Him most.

Ever been there? I have.

I felt it the night my first daughter was born with a diaphragmatic hernia, her life hanging in the balance, despite months of praying for a safe, healthy delivery. I stood in her empty nursery while she fought for life in intensive care, asking “Where are You, God?”

I felt it again when my first wife died of cancer. How does God seemingly walk away from a little girl and her father in a moment like that? And again, outside an operating room, waiting while my second wife underwent surgery for breast cancer. Really? Again?

These aren’t abstract theological puzzles. They’re gut-level collisions with silence.

C. S. Lewis once wrestled with this very tension in an essay on prayer, writing:

“Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, ‘Why hast thou forsaken me?’ When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore.”

That “mystery” is often referred to by a name you’ve probably heard: the dark night of the soul, which is taken from a poem by John of the Cross. It describes a season marked by confusion, spiritual dryness, and the haunting sense that God has withdrawn.

Even Mother Teresa experienced it, once writing:

“The place of God in my soul is blank. There is no God in me. When the pain of longing is so great I just long and long for God and then it is that I feel He does not want me He is not there. Heaven, souls, why these are just words, which mean nothing to me. My very life seems contradictory.”

That’s not spiritual weakness, by the way — that’s honesty at a level most of us avoid.

What makes it worse? Sometimes other Christians.

Well-meaning believers often chastise those hurting and pile on with verses about God never forsaking His people such as “I have been young and now I am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken” (Ps. 37:25) or Jesus’ statement of “I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (Matt. 28:20). All of this to subtly (or not so subtly) imply: If you feel abandoned, the problem isn’t God — it’s you.

Nothing like dumping a heaping tablespoon of guilt onto an already bruised soul.

But what if that assumption is wrong? What if those dry, silent seasons aren’t signs of failure, but instead part of God’s design?

John Newton, the “Amazing Grace” hymn author and minister, put forward the idea that a Christian’s life progressed through three stages, which he took after a verse in the Gospel of Mark: “For the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself; first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear” (Mark 4:28, KJV). In his collected works entitled The Letters of John Newton, he referred to these stages as grace in the blade, grace in the ear, and grace in the corn, which he shortened to stages A, B, and C.

Stage A, he said, is spiritual infancy, when everything feels alive and electric. Prayers seem answered instantly. God feels close, almost tangible. Newton likened it to being carried in a shepherd’s arms: safe, warm, constantly reassured.

Then comes Stage B. And things start to change.

Newton says our faith that began in Stage A has started to grow sturdy:

“And now that faith is stronger, it has more to grapple with … I think the characteristic of the state of ‘A’ is desire, and of ‘B’ is conflict. Not that B’s desires have subsided, or that ‘A’ was a stranger to conflict; but as there was a sensible eagerness and keenness in A’s desires, which, perhaps, is seldom known to be equally strong afterwards, so there are usually trials and exercises in B’s experience; something different in their kind and sharper in their measure than what ‘A’ was exposed to, or indeed had strength to endure.”

Faith begins to toughen. The emotional highs fade. The sense of God’s presence becomes intermittent, sometimes vanishing altogether. Newton describes this stage not by desire, but by conflict: deeper trials, sharper struggles, and a kind of testing that Stage A believers simply aren’t ready for.

This is where many Christians panic. But that doesn’t have to happen.

Tim Keller put it this way: when a child is young, a parent holds their hand to cross the street. But at some point, that same parent steps back and says, “Now you go.” Keller explains: “When God starts to call you to face things without the sense of His presence … it’s probably God saying it’s time for you to cross the street by yourself.”

That’s not abandonment. That’s development.

Both Newton and Keller make the same unsettling point: one of the clearest signs you’re growing up spiritually is that you don’t always feel God anymore. Welcome to maturity.

Stage B is where you stop relying on spiritual feelings and start standing on something sturdier: the Word of God itself. It’s where you’re forced to let go of the comforting idea that God’s presence is always something you’ll feel and embrace the harder truth that sometimes it’s something you must trust.

Eventually, Newton says, comes Stage C.

This is where faith stabilizes, not because life gets easier, but because your confidence in God is no longer tethered to your emotional state. You know Him, not just in moments of clarity, but through seasons of silence.

It’s what the apostle John meant when he wrote to the “fathers,” those who “know Him who has been from the beginning” (1 John 2:13).

Not feel Him. Know Him. There’s a difference.

So, the next time God feels distant and when your prayers hit the ceiling and fall back unanswered, don’t rush to diagnose yourself as spiritually defective. Instead, know that you’re safe in His plan and maturing just as Scripture says: “We are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves … we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Eph. 4:14–15).

In other words, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re growing. It may be Stage B doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: stripping away your dependence on feelings so something deeper can take root.

God hasn’t left. You’re just being asked to walk without holding His hand for a while. And that’s not a step backward. It’s the only way forward,

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Prayer is a relationship between our Heavenly Father and his beloved –much like a marriage. It often begins with a honeymoon (A) where God seems close. It grows through trials and conflict (B) including waiting and silence. It finally matures (C) into trusting Who God is–not what He does.

Keep walking forward in amazing friendship with God through prayer.