There was a stretch — about six weeks, one winter — when I prayed every morning the same way I had for years, and it felt like talking into a closet. Not angry silence. Not punishing silence. Just... nothing. No sense of presence, no verse that landed differently than the day before, no feeling that anyone on the other end was listening. I've been a pastor. I've led men's groups through their own dry seasons and told them it was normal. And then it happened to me, and every bit of that pastoral confidence went out the window, because knowing a thing intellectually and living inside it are two completely different experiences.
I kept showing up anyway. Not because I felt like it — I want to be honest that I mostly didn't — but because somewhere along the way I'd decided that showing up isn't supposed to be conditional on the room feeling full.
The Season Has a Name
Christian tradition has a name for this that's older than any of us: the dark night of the soul, a phrase from the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross, who wrote about it not as a crisis of faith but as a normal, even necessary, stage of spiritual maturity — the season where God withdraws the felt comfort of His presence so that your faith stops depending on feeling comforted and starts depending on something sturdier. It's not evidence that you're doing something wrong. Sometimes it's evidence that you're growing up.
The Psalms back this up more than almost any other book in Scripture. About a third of them are laments — honest, sometimes furious complaints to God about His apparent absence. These weren't cut from the canon for being insufficiently faithful. They were kept in, front and center, because the writers understood something we forget: naming the silence to God is still prayer. Maybe it's the most honest prayer there is.
"How long, LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" — Psalm 13:1
Let's Be Honest About What We Actually Do
Here's the part I don't love admitting: my instinct in that season wasn't to pray more honestly. It was to quietly stop, or at least go through the motions so thin they barely counted, because if God wasn't going to show up, why should I. That's the real temptation in a dry season — not doubt exactly, but disengagement dressed up as reasonableness. It feels smarter than it is. It's just avoidance with a theology degree.
What Actually Got Me Through It
I stopped waiting to feel like praying before I prayed. For six weeks, the discipline had to run on willpower and habit, not on emotion. That felt hollow at first. It didn't stay hollow — but I didn't know that yet while I was in it, and I had to keep going without the reassurance.
I switched from asking for something to just describing what was true. Instead of petitions that felt like they were falling into a void, I started simply telling God what the day actually held — the meeting I dreaded, the ache in my knee, the guilt I was carrying about a call I hadn't made. Less performance, more honesty. It's a smaller ask of a silent room, and somehow it felt less lonely.
I let the Psalms of lament pray for me on the days I had nothing. Psalm 13, Psalm 22, Psalm 88 — I read them out loud, in my own voice, as if they were mine, because on the worst mornings they were closer to true than anything I could have written myself.
The silence didn't end because I found the right technique. It ended the way most dry seasons end — gradually, without an announcement, so that one morning I noticed the room didn't feel empty anymore and I couldn't tell you exactly when that had changed. What I can tell you is that I showed up through every single morning it didn't feel that way, and I think that's the only part of the whole six weeks that was actually up to me.
If the room has felt empty for you lately, what would it look like to keep showing up anyway — not because you feel it, but because you've decided to?