When God Feels Absent

Walking Home: A Series for Veterans Carrying Wounds the World Can’t See — Part 9

(All Scripture quotations are from the New Living Translation, NLT.)

Maybe this is the one you don’t say out loud in church. You’ve prayed, and the ceiling felt like concrete. You’ve reached for God in the dark and touched nothing. Everyone around you talks about feeling His presence, His peace, His nearness — and you’ve started to wonder if something is broken in you, because where they feel Someone, you feel silence.

Some veterans carry this quietly for years: not anger at God, exactly, but the ache of His apparent absence. The sense that when you needed Him most — over there, or in the worst nights since — He wasn’t there, or didn’t answer, or turned away. I’m not going to tell you to just have more faith. I’m going to tell you something truer and far more comforting: the silence you’ve felt is not the abandonment you fear — and the Bible is not afraid of this feeling. It gives it words.

The Prayer God Wrote for the God-Forsaken

There is a psalm that begins with the exact cry of a person who feels God has vanished: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? Why are you so far away when I groan for help? Every day I call to you, my God, but you do not answer” (Psalm 22:1–2, NLT).

Sit with the fact that those words are in the Bible. God did not delete the prayer of a person who felt abandoned by Him. He preserved it, breathed it out as Scripture, and handed it to us as permission — permission to feel this, and to say it to His face. If you’ve been ashamed of the ache, let that shame go. The ache has been prayed by the faithful for three thousand years, and God called the prayer holy.

But here’s what you have to notice about Psalm 22. It begins in that feeling — and it does not stay there. The same psalm that starts “Why have you abandoned me?” travels, honestly and without skipping the pain, to this:

“For he has not ignored or belittled the suffering of the needy. He has not turned his back on them, but has listened to their cries for help” (Psalm 22:24, NLT). The feeling said God turned His back. The truth, arrived at through the prayer, was that He never did. Both are in the psalm. The feeling was real — and it was not the final fact.

The Difference Between Feeling and Fact

This is the thing no one may have told you: the presence of God and the felt sense of the presence of God are not the same thing. Feelings are weather. They come and go with your sleep, your body, your trauma, your brain chemistry, the season you’re in. A veteran whose nervous system has been through war may have a harder time feeling calm nearness than someone who hasn’t — and that is not a spiritual failure. It’s a wound. God’s actual presence does not flicker on and off with your ability to feel it.

That’s why God anchors His promise to His character and His word, not to your feelings: “I will never fail you. I will never abandon you” (Hebrews 13:5, NLT). He didn’t say, “you will always feel Me.” He said He will never leave. On the days you feel Him, He is there. On the days the sky is concrete, and you feel nothing, He is exactly as there. Faith is trusting the promise on the days the feeling goes missing.

There’s an old truth worth holding onto here: the sun has not stopped shining just because a cloud has come between you and it for a while. The absence you feel is often a cloud, not a departure.

The One Who Was Truly Forsaken — So You Never Will Be

Now here is the deepest comfort in all of Scripture for the veteran who feels God-forsaken, and I want you to hold it with both hands.

Remember where we first heard the words of Psalm 22 in this series. On the cross, in His final agony, Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” (Matthew 27:46, NLT) — quoting that very psalm. Let that sink all the way in. The Son of God Himself entered the experience of being forsaken. He knows the feeling from the inside — not as a theory, but as the worst moment of the cross.

But it goes further than sympathy. On the cross, Jesus was not just feeling forsaken — in that hour, bearing the sin of the world, He was truly forsaken by the Father, cut off in a way you and I never will be. Why does that matter to you? Because He took the real abandonment — the actual God-forsakenness that our sin deserved — so that it would never fall on you. He was forsaken so that you could have the promise “I will never abandon you” and have it be true forever. The very worst thing you fear has already happened — to Him, in your place — so that it can never happen to you.

So when the silence comes, you are not falling out of God’s hand. You are, at most, walking through a stretch of road where you can’t feel His hand — while He holds on just as tightly as ever. Feeling the grip is not what keeps you. His grip is what keeps you.

Praying Through the Silence

So what do you do when God feels absent? You do what Psalm 22 does — you keep praying, right into the silence, honestly. “God, I can’t feel You. It feels like You’re not here. I’m telling You that to Your face — and I’m going to keep talking to You anyway, because You said You never left.” That is not weak faith. That is the strongest kind there is: obedience and trust when the feeling gives you nothing to lean on.

Keep showing up. Keep reading the Word even when it seems flat, because the promise is true whether it feels warm or not. Lean on the people God gave you when you can’t feel Him directly — sometimes His presence comes through a brother’s phone call more than a felt glow. And wait, without panic, for the cloud to move. “Weeping may last through the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5, NLT).

The silence is not the end of the story, and it is not the verdict on your faith. The God you can’t feel right now is the same God who was forsaken in your place so He would never have to forsake you. He is here, soldier — in the concrete-ceiling nights just as surely as the bright ones. Keep talking. He never once stopped listening.

Need to talk

Peter 810.922.1473            Bill 586.404.3316

Next in the series: Commissioned, Not Discharged — your true identity in Christ, and how the very wound you’ve carried becomes the ministry only you can give.