Praying when you feel nothing is the part nobody warns you about. We talk a great deal about how to pray and almost never about what to do on the mornings when you do it and absolutely nothing happens.
FOUR THIRTY IN THE MORNING, AND NOTHING
My friend Dan Green has been getting up at four thirty for twenty-five years. Coffee, his chair, a study Bible that never leaves his side. He is two years into stage four cancer and he still does it, on the mornings he is sick and the mornings he is not.
And he will tell you plainly that sometimes the Holy Spirit makes something jump off the page at him, and it lifts him up for the whole day.
And sometimes nothing does.
He says it just like that, without dressing it up. Not every morning delivers.
WHY PRAYING WHEN YOU FEEL NOTHING IS NOT FAILURE
Most of us treat the feeling as the scoreboard. If I felt close to God, it worked. If I felt nothing, either I did it wrong or He was not listening.
That is a brutal way to live, and it is not true.
Praying when you feel nothing is not evidence of a problem. It is evidence that you are a human being with a body, and that body is tired, or medicated, or grieving, or has been awake since three. Feelings are weather. They are not the relationship.
DAVID DID NOT FEEL IT EITHER
The Psalms are full of this, which is exactly why Dan found them such a relief.
In the forty-second Psalm, David is not soaring. He is asking his own soul why it is cast down and why it is disquieted within him. He is talking to himself because God feels far away. And then he does something worth copying - he tells himself to hope in God anyway, because he will yet praise Him.
That is a man praying when you feel nothing, and it is in Scripture on purpose.
Dan told us he used to feel guilty that so many of his prayers were about himself and his own family - until he noticed David doing exactly the same thing on nearly every page.
WHAT DAN DOES ANYWAY
He keeps going. That is the whole method.
He picks a book of the Bible and works through it a chapter a day for two or three weeks. He keeps a commentary nearby. He asks the Holy Spirit to show him something before he starts. And when nothing comes, he shows up again the next morning.
His words: God gave us His Word for a reason, not just to carry to church on Sunday. There is an answer in there for everything we face in this life. Spend the time. Do not give up.
Notice what he is not saying. He is not promising you a feeling by Friday. He is saying the showing up is the thing, and the feeling is not the point.
IF THIS WEEK HAS BEEN EMPTY
Then you are not behind and you are not doing it wrong.
Praying when you feel nothing may be the most honest praying you ever do, because there is no reward in it except obedience. Nobody is watching. Nothing is confirming it. You are simply still there, and He notices that.
Ten minutes tomorrow. One chapter. A short, plain conversation about how you are actually doing. That is enough. It has always been enough.
YOU ARE NEVER ALONE
Here is the part that does not depend on how you feel. Jesus is in the room whether it registers or not. His presence was never conditional on your ability to sense it, and He is not standing back waiting for you to feel something first.
Sometimes all we have to do is turn our head ninety degrees to realize He is right there beside us.
If you do not have that relationship with Him, or yours has gone cold or weak or angry, please visit our Accepting Jesus page. Nothing else on this site matters as much.
You are NEVER ALONE. Never.
Listen to the Podcast - Dan's Story, Part Four: I'm Not a Prayer Warrior