Feeling Abandoned by God
Feeling Abandoned by God
You feel it in your gut: God has left. He was there before, or at least you thought He was, but now there is only absence. You reach for Him and grasp air. You call out and hear your own voice echo back. The silence is not neutral; it feels personal, intentional, like a door closed in your face. You have been abandoned by the one person who was never supposed to leave.
This feeling is one of the most painful parts of grief, often more painful than the loss itself. You expected to lose your loved one; you did not expect to lose God. You thought He would be the constant, the anchor, the presence that remained when everything else fell away. Instead He seems to have fallen away too, and you are left with the terrifying suspicion that you are truly alone.
You are not. But telling you that is not enough, because the feeling is so strong that it drowns out everything else. Feelings are liars, especially in grief, and this particular feeling is one of the Enemy's most effective tools. He cannot actually separate you from God, so he does the next best thing: he convinces you that God has separated Himself from you. If he can make you believe that, he can stop you from seeking the very presence that would sustain you.
So let us be clear about what is actually happening. God has not abandoned you. He has not withdrawn His presence because of something you did or failed to do. He has not decided that your grief is too messy, your faith too weak, your doubts too offensive to tolerate. The covenant He made with you is not contingent on your emotional state or your ability to feel Him near. He is present whether you perceive Him or not, and your feelings, however powerful, do not have the authority to override His promises.
But why does it feel this way? Partly because grief overwhelms the senses and partly because you may be looking for the wrong thing. You are looking for a feeling of comfort, a sense of warmth, an emotional experience that confirms God's presence. When it does not come, you conclude He is not there. But God's presence is not always accompanied by feelings, and demanding that it be so is a form of testing Him. You are essentially saying, "Prove You are here by making me feel something," and God does not always comply with those terms.
This is where you must exercise your will against your feelings. You must choose to believe what you know over what you feel, and what you know is that God is faithful. He has said He will never leave you or forsake you, and either that is true or it is not. If it is true, then your feelings are wrong, and you must act accordingly. If it is not true, then you have larger problems than grief.
Acting accordingly means seeking God even when it feels pointless. It means praying even when you suspect no one is listening. It means reading Scripture even when the words feel hollow and showing up to worship even when you feel like a hypocrite for being there. These are acts of defiance against the lie of abandonment. They are declarations that you will not let your feelings dictate your faith, that you will trust the character of God over the chaos of your emotions.
It also means being honest with God about how you feel. He is not offended by your sense of abandonment; He has heard it before. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" is a line from a Psalm, spoken by David and later by Jesus Himself on the cross. You are in good company. Tell God you feel abandoned. Tell Him you are angry about it. Tell Him you do not understand why He will not show Himself more clearly. He can handle your honesty, and voicing the feeling often begins to loosen its grip.
The sense of abandonment will pass. It does not feel like it will, but it will. God is working even now, in the silence, in the absence, in the darkness you cannot see through. Your job is not to feel Him but to trust Him, and to keep seeking until the fog clears. He has not left. He will not leave. And when you finally sense His presence again, you will find that it is richer and more real than anything you knew before.
Week 3: Understanding God's Presence
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