Sometimes, most times, I leave the place of prayer feeling empty. I leave having not felt the presence of God and having not heard his voice. For several reasons I am reluctant to say this out loud.
First, such a confession does not encourage others to pray, something Jesus taught His followers to do. I would hate to be the reason others stopped praying. Our culture, even in the church, is permeated with therapeutic values. We celebrate all the benefits of prayer: deliverance from burdens, sweet fellowship with Jesus, the cure for our loneliness. When therapeutic benefits are the main reason for praying, saying that prayer leaves me empty seems like heresy. Why even pray?
Second, my confession invites others to diagnose my spiritual malfunction and give advice. Some will see this as a bad case of walking by feelings and not faith. I will be accused of getting the train of faith out of order: fact, faith, feeling. And yet, their advice is often contradictory—if you had more faith, you would feel more of God’s presence and hear His voice more clearly, but don’t worry about feeling. Part of the trouble is that we have all these worship songs and many hymns about the friend we have in Jesus and how He walks with us and talks with us. Therefore, it seems, something in me must be broken or off the rails. Perhaps my caboose is in the weeds.
Others will simply critique my technique and prescribe five steps to hearing the voice of God. These advisors assert that God is always speaking, but we just haven’t been taught to hear His voice. There are books on this. However, I check most of the boxes on these steps: time alone with God, a prayer journal, time letting God speak through His Word, and sensitivity to God speaking through nature, circumstances, and other people. So, now what?
More sympathetic folks might diagnose me as having a “dark night of the soul.” Recently, I burned journals full of prayers for my dead son, Peter. It was a black night. But the last five years of watching Peter struggle with sin, addiction, and Type-One “brittle” diabetes has been much darker. Years! It is terrible and sad to admit, things got slightly brighter when he died. But then Teckla was diagnosed with dementia, a new kind of enduring grief and darkness. “Night” hardly seems the right word here.
It is not that advice is unwelcome. When I imagine trying to pastor myself, I shudder. What counsel should or could I offer? What do say after you have checked the usual suspects off the list, but the person is still feeling empty? I certainly don’t want others to doubt the warm fellowship with God they are experiencing. I’m glad they are chatting with Jesus. Full is better than empty.
My emptiness, however, is not complete. My emptiness contains an ache for God and a hunger for His presence. I am not wrestling with questions that I am impatiently demanding God answer. I hunger for His voice. I long to hear His observations on my life. We could talk about the weather. Like the Psalmist says, “My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.”
In church we celebrate this crying out without giving much thought or space to the emptiness from which it springs. We are quick to celebrate an answer to the cry, but struggle to validate the emptiness, the heart-broken longing, and the agony of separation—despite all the times these come up in the Psalms.
As I was talking to God about this emptiness, it occurred to me that even this emptiness is a gift. Some, at this point in my story, might be jumping up and down and saying, “Mark, that thought was God talking to you, you ninny!” Of course, you may be right.
A godward emptiness is certainly a gift when compared to the alternatives: apathy, despair, and bitterness. These are real and present dangers. Being like Job and not cursing God, however, will not make you an in-demand speaker at conferences. No one wants my book on five steps to spiritual emptiness and a hunger for God.
If this is a long dark night of the soul, I have lost hope that the dawn will break before I do. But I hold tightly to the hope of glory—when I see Jesus and become like Him. Until that day, I will treasure my emptiness—my heart’s cry for Jesus. This too is a gift.
