The Desert of Spiritual Dryness
It happens. So you’ve made amends, asked God for forgiveness, and are now back on track with resolutions to make yourself more effective, smarter, stronger and, in totality-better. You’ve made sure to change your habits, to be more consistent, to make sure that He has become part of your daily routine by fixing a schedule to stop and pray. It’s a whole new you!
And then IT happens.
It’s quiet, too. The burst of energy and inspiration that inexplicably flowed through your veins after meditation and a moment’s reprise is gone. “Where is He? Can he hear me?” you wonder at the back of your mind. And you realize that it’s been a while, that your heart has become a little colder. It seems more difficult now without the warmth, the passion and the fire burning inside you.
“Did I do something wrong?”
But you know what to do. You know that the habits are there, and that the prayer time has become a fixed point in your day. And then the little doubts start to come in, “Maybe I can skip this hour, anyway He won’t mind. He knows what’s wrong with me.” Later on, the reason becomes, “I’m too tired from the day. He’ll understand why I can’t pray right now. Anyway, my spirit isn’t disposed towards prayer. It would be a poor offering to him.” And then, before you know it, He’s become part of the background again, and your resolutions to include Him in your daily life have been rationalized to include prayer in some other way aside from itself-a moment of sincere conversation with Him, alone.
Spiritual dryness is a sly enemy, starting with small things and guising itself as rational decisions which are still “for God”, when clearly the perspective has shifted towards yourself or on other things which have become more valuable.
As a metaphor, spiritual dryness is very much like a desert. Imagine this: you’ve set out, with your tools for survival… your food, canister of water, your body in shape… all for this time to prove your zeal to head out and to conquer.
Everything is all right while you’re seeing things as they warned you they would be. You’ve made sure that you fixed your supplies and prepared yourself for the onslaught of threats. And then here comes the desert that you’ve heard about, the long desert. You know that your canister of water will keep you going. Even more, your body’s inner supply of water is also there as a final source of survival.
You’re halfway through the desert and still no oasis in sight… what now? Your canister is still quite full because you really don’t feel like you need to drink anyway-you’re fine! A little further on, you begin to feel thirsty, and continue to hold it off until you realize that you’re so thirsty that you down the canister to half its contents… but it’s not enough! It felt good for a moment, but it’s not enough! “How much longer through this desert?” you ask yourself, and no one can give you an answer. And then it becomes more real now, that space between you and but you and the desert.
Similarly, here lies one of the challenges for a follower of Christ: to keep going even when the desert surrounds you, to keep yourself properly hydrated despite the long stretch of parched land, to find sustenance while being completely in the middle of nowhere. Spiritual dryness can be more deadly than actual, physical conditions, inasmuch as it threatens your soul; your soul becomes thirsty until it just gives up or waits for an oasis in the desert to come along to revive it.
In the same way, your daily habit to stay connected is like that canister of water: those little sips you take from it, and how you value it during that long desert trip. If you drink the water all at once, relying on finding the oasis by your own hard work and navigation, and completely relying on the water you had stored in your body to keep you going… well, you’re doomed to dehydrate yourself halfway through. True enough, your own body’s supply of water might be able to fend off the heat of the desert, and the dehydration, but only for a while. Once you’re dehydrated and nothing’s left to drink, you may just give up completely and allow the desert to consume you:
“I was wrong after all. Maybe God doesn’t really care about me.”
“How could He allow me to suffer like this? Why is He silent now? Why won’t He save me?”
“What’s the point of it all? Why did I even bother to start again? I knew that it wouldn’t last anyway, why did I even try at all?”
“It was much better where I was before. I should have never set out, and would have never ended up in this desert!”
See the futility in these statements? More importantly, see how focused they are on the self?
So in the same way, it is possible to point out that, unlike an actual desert, in spiritual dryness we can rely on the reality that there are other springs of hope. This we can find in our true friends, in other followers of Christ, who can help encourage us and remind us of the way back on the road. Also, our spiritual adviser is always there to help us through the difficult parts of the journey by listening to us and giving us the right tools to keep going. In the same breath, I hope that this little entry also finds you. To encourage you, that you are not alone as a follower of Christ, and that you are not alone in feeling these moments of difficulty. The key word here is that the desert has a limit; spiritual dryness shall pass, as long as you don’t allow it to consume you.
Keep your sights set on the right goal, in fulfilling His work through your hands, and you’ll see that it will be a lot easier. And, you’ll see- once you’ve gone through the desert and look back on how you survived it (not completely on your own), you gain a greater life expererience and appreciation of living it. Not to mention, you can’t help but learn to appreciate water more and not take it for granted!
So here concludes this entry, and I cannot help but see that this ought to be a reminder for me when the days have become dreary too: find ways to build the habit of spending time with God without fail, of making that quiet time a part of your day and of your life. It’s the little sips from the water of life that get us through the parched terrain; it may not be as much water as we’re used to, but it will definitely get us through until we find the water source again.
P.S. Here is just a little more encouragement, coming your way through Ravi Zacharias's podcast entitled, "Mind the Gap"