Where Did My Peace and Joy Go?
Where Did My Peace and Joy Go?
You used to feel it: that quiet certainty, that warmth in worship, that sense of being held by something larger than yourself. Now there is nothing. You pray and hear silence. You read Scripture and the words sit flat on the page like dead leaves. You go through the motions of faith, but the motions feel hollow, and you are beginning to wonder if they ever meant anything at all.
Where did it go?
Grief did this. Grief does not only steal people; it steals feelings. It numbs what used to flow freely and mutes what used to sing. The peace you once felt, the joy that once rose unbidden in worship or prayer, these were real and they were gifts. But right now they are gone, and their absence feels like abandonment.
It is not. God has not withdrawn from you because you failed some spiritual test. He has not turned His face away in disgust at your doubt or your anger or your inability to muster enthusiasm for the things that once moved you. The absence you feel is not His absence but yours: grief has drawn a curtain between you and your own capacity to perceive Him. He is still there. You simply cannot see Him through the fog.
This is hard to accept because it feels like a technicality. It feels like being told the sun is shining while you stand in the dark. But feelings are not facts, and your inability to sense God does not mean He is not present. A man in a coma does not perceive the doctor working to save his life, but the doctor has not left the room. Your spiritual anaesthesia is temporary, not terminal.
So what do you do when the feelings disappear?
You stop chasing them, for a start. Peace and joy are fruits of the Spirit, not achievements you unlock through effort or willpower. The harder you grasp for them, the more elusive they become, like trying to catch water in your fist. You cannot manufacture what only God can give, and striving to feel what you cannot feel will only exhaust you further.
Instead, act on what you know rather than what you feel. You know God is faithful even if you cannot feel His faithfulness. You know He has not abandoned you even if His presence seems distant. You know His promises are true even when they feel like words on a page. Act on that knowledge. Pray even when prayer feels pointless. Read Scripture even when it feels dead. Worship even when your heart is not in it. Obedience does not require enthusiasm, and sometimes faithfulness means showing up empty-handed and doing the work anyway.
You must also stop measuring your faith by your feelings. This is a trap that has caught many grieving Christians and convinced them they have lost something they never actually lost. Feelings fluctuate wildly; they respond to sleep and weather and digestion and a thousand other variables that have nothing to do with your spiritual state. A faith that rises and falls with your emotional temperature is not faith at all but mood. Faith is what remains when feelings leave, and it is often stronger for having been tested.
Finally, be patient with yourself and with the process. Grief has a timeline that you do not control, and the numbness will lift when it lifts, not when you demand it to. Peace and joy will return, though perhaps in forms you do not recognise at first. You are not the same person you were before your loss, and your experience of God will not be the same either. This is not a downgrade. It may be something deeper than what you had before, tempered by suffering and refined by honesty.
The absence of feeling is not the absence of God. He is at work in you right now, whether you sense it or not, and your job is not to feel Him but to trust Him. Keep showing up. Keep doing the work. The feelings will catch up with the facts eventually.
They will.
Week 1: Understanding Despair
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