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{{info}}The landscape of college ministry has shifted dramatically over the past 25 years. But here in 2025, I’m still consistently receiving the same question that I asked as a student: “Why am I not feeling it?”

Why am I not more excited about Jesus? Why doesn’t the gospel taste sweeter to me? Why are my emotions not responding to the best news in the world? I have a wealth of Christian resources, but I’m still desperately grasping for joy. Why does it stay tantalizingly out of reach?

'''Two Common Diagnoses'''

Before we go further, it must be said that the majority of those who experience this kind of unwelcome numbness are not fully numb. They are selectively excited. They still find themselves giddy about gaming, wild about the weekend, or captivated by a crush. It’s the spiritual pursuit, or perhaps the very nature of God, that douses the flame.

Years ago, I was leading a weekly Bible study of sophomore men. At the beginning of each meeting, one of these sophomores was playful, energetic, even squirrely. But almost without fail, his eyes would begin to droop when we would open the Bible — as if some form of yet-undiagnosed, Scripture-induced narcolepsy had seized him. (My children are often afflicted with the same strange condition.)

While this was an embarrassingly overt case, parallel stories of selective excitement remain common, and there are generally only two diagnoses.

'''Spiritually Dead'''

On the one hand, the person has yet to develop a taste for God at all. Scripture clearly states that God turns on the lights of Christward affection in our hearts (2 Corinthians 4:6), but before that wonderful awakening, we are prone to be bored by anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly exalt ourselves. So the Bible, which humbles us on every page, is somewhere between repulsive and boring, and talk of God evokes a response akin to Edmund’s at the first mention of Aslan’s name.

If you are reading this and deeply concerned that you are of that number, I am less concerned than you are — precisely because you’re unsettled. It is far more likely that you fall into a second category.

'''Spiritually Distracted'''

In this case, the person isn’t “feeling it” because he has been nibbling on lesser joys, like a child who has no appetite for a steak dinner because there are a dozen candy wrappers in his pocket. I confess that I often live here, surprised by my lack of hunger for the living God but slow to consider how I have given myself to the seemingly innocent distractions of little phone games or ESPN throughout the day (or throughout the season). As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires,” we are then shocked at our lack of spiritual fervor (''The Great Divorce'', 38). We make a mockery of David’s singular aim of God-gazing in Psalm 27:4, betraying our true practice in this ungodly paraphrase:

<blockquote>Twenty-six things have I asked of the Lord, and those will I seek after . . . gazing upon his beauty is peripherally one of them.</blockquote>

So, if your affections for God aren’t accurately reflecting the goodness of who he is, first take an honest inventory of your prayer life, your thought life, your diet, and (perhaps especially) your screen time. Perhaps you will find that you are an average hyper-stimulated citizen of the twenty-first century, giving in to secular liturgies with every free moment.

'''When the Dryness Remains'''

But when that inventory is taken, the competing liturgies are stripped away (or at least taken captive to the obedience of Christ), and that spiritual dryness remains, what then? What of the seasons when I put my head under the normal waterfall of grace, and I still feel thirsty? Or worse, when my thirst is as weak as the trickle that falls from the expected fountainhead? What if, like Heman the Ezrahite in Psalm 88, “Every day I call upon you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you,” but “I suffer your terrors; I am helpless” (Psalm 88:9, 15)?

Many have experienced deserts vaster and drier than my own, but I can offer a few helps from my mixture of faithfulness and failure in this area.

'''1. Trace sunbeams back to the Sun.'''

I once met with a Christian counselor after getting fed up with my hyperactive mind, my questions about God, and the ensuing distance from him I felt. That counselor gave me some simple advice I have carried ever since: use creation to taste the goodness of the Lord. He told me to take moments to be more tactile and less cerebral, touching a leaf to remember God’s brightness and liveliness, feeling a breeze to remember his gentleness. Gamers today advise one another to “touch grass,” and if we are using said grass-touching to trace sunbeams back to the Sun, it’s not bad advice (James 1:17).

'''2. Let art wake you up.'''

God is not boring. In his presence is fullness of joy (Psalm 16:11). But my own drabness dirties my lens for seeing him, so I often employ the aid of musicians and filmmakers to turn my experiential prose into poetry. God has gifted some with the ability to feel deeply and, even better, to depict their emotions vividly. Borrow from them. My tear ducts regularly run dry until God opens them through the haunting, heavenly sounds of Sigur Rós or the depiction of fatherly pursuit in ''Finding Nemo''.

'''3. Engage the poor and marginalized.'''

I assume that most of the world, for most of history, has struggled less with longing for God than we do in the prosperous and peaceful West. I currently live in a town called Mount Pleasant, and the back half of the name fits (not so much the front: our highest point above sea level is seven feet). So, in a Monday-morning pastors’ meeting, our senior pastor asked, “How do we keep longing for heaven here?” He was heeding the warning of Hosea 13:5–6:

<blockquote>It was I who knew you in the wilderness,<br>
in the land of drought;<br>
but when they had grazed, they became full,<br>
they were filled, and their heart was lifted up;<br>
therefore they forgot me.</blockquote>

Yes, we have the universal wake-up calls of sin, aging, disease, and death to keep our longings aimed at eternity, but the contrast between Mount Pleasant and heaven doesn’t always seem so stark. Seeking to build heaven on earth is a recipe for numbness. When we tie our life to those of the poor, the fatherless, the widow, or the refugee, we not only heed the heart of God but also remember more regularly the brokenness of our current age.

'''4. Gaze at Jesus, not your affections.'''

I spent too many years checking my spiritual blood pressure and becoming immediately discouraged by the gap between the wonders of God and the gospel on the one hand and my puny affections on the other. It became a tooth-gritting (and losing) battle that was eventually resolved (and continues to be) by acknowledging the full sufficiency of my Substitute.

I remember driving around the University of Minnesota in my white Nissan Quest minivan in a yelling match with the Lord as my questions and self-doubts tied me in knots. By God’s grace, it finally came to me: Jesus’s affections for his Father were perfectly aligned with the magnitude of divine beauty. The strength of his faith was one hundred percent. Why had I been assuming that my sinful ''actions'' required a crucifixion, but my ''affections'' and ''faith'' were on my shoulders? I asked Jesus to take the lump sum of my weakness, including my paltry hunger for him, and to cover it with his blood. Though less dramatic, my experience was not dissimilar to Martin Luther’s: “The gates of paradise were opened to me.”

My gaze shifted. And the strangest thing happened: when my subjective affections ceased to be the basis of my confidence, they began to grow. Jesus’s gracious sufficiency to cover and carry me made him seem as wonderful as he actually is.

5. Wait.
I have often swallowed the microwave mantra of our instant-gratification society. I don’t go to Wendy’s if the drive-through is too long. I feel the impulse to reach for my phone if two people are in front of me at the grocery store. This disease makes me feel as though a day or week or month of spiritual dryness is abnormal, even unjust. Waiting, though a prominent theme across the pages of Scripture, does not have popular appeal. Yet Jeremiah commends it:

<blockquote>The Lord is good to those who wait for him,<br>
to the soul who seeks him.<br>
It is good that one should wait quietly<br>
for the salvation of the Lord.<br>
It is good for a man that he bear<br>
the yoke in his youth.<br>
Let him sit alone in silence<br>
when it is laid on him;<br>
let him put his mouth in the dust —<br>
there may yet be hope. (Lamentations 3:25–29)</blockquote>

It is ''good'' to wait? Why? There may be some speculation here, but I think our taste for the unseen God is best cultivated when we are conscious of the dry and desert land that is this fallen world without God’s visible, tangible presence. The entire life of a believer can rightly be described as a fast, beset with hunger pangs until Jesus’s return (Matthew 9:15). Unsatiated hunger for God is the fitting experience of the believer before glory. Feeling that ''this is not the way it’s supposed to be'' is the way it’s supposed to be — for now.

But ''now'' is so very brief in the grand scheme. To quote Gandalf, soon “the grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it . . . white shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise” (''The Lord of the Rings'', 1030). In that instant, we will see and so become like Jesus (1 John 3:2), and all our nagging numbness and depressing doubts will be put to death. Take heart, feeble-faithed believer; he will carry you there.