Does God Feel Distant? Do You Feel Like You Were Alone in the Past? God is with You Now, and He has Always Been Beside You

When someone has come through a hard past, it can be hard to trust that God could be interested in their life in the here and now. If you have lived through a lot of pain, if life has seemed unfair for you, it can be hard to believe that God cares about you. If he’s with you now, where was he when you were in pain?

Psalm 13 discusses a feeling of distance from God. The Psalmist cries out to God, asking him why he has forgotten him. It seems that the Psalmist is in a hard place and he feels that he has been abandoned.

“Will you forget me forever?” the Psalmist asks.

We don’t always know God’s plan for our lives and we don’t always know where he is when we are in pain. There are times when we reach out in an attempt to have God with us and we feel like he’s too far away to hear us. There are times when we feel alone, we feel forgotten.

Even in those times  when we feel like God is hiding from us, he is with us. Even if we feel that God was nowhere to be found in our past, he was there. What we want from life is not always the same as what God has in store for us. There are times when we must struggle in order for us to have the life that is meant for us.

Toward the end of Psalm 13, the writer states that “I trust in your unfailing love”. The Psalmist isn’t about to give up on God, even when he feels abandoned. He holds on to his trust even in a hard time. It is important for us to do the same.

Whether you are faced with a hard past where you did not feel God’s presence or you feel like you have been abandoned by him now, know that he is always there. Even when he feels far away, he is right beside you. He might not take away each of your struggles, but he will stand by you in the midst of it all. You can call out to him and find him right there, even in your pain.

In our book No Longer Broken, there are those characters who have come through difficult circumstances. They have to wonder where God was when they were faced with pain. The conclusion of the book brings about healing for those characters, the healing that comes only through God and the healing that often comes after we have felt far away from him. He is with us even when it doesn’t feel like he is, and we can reach out to him even when it feels like he is nowhere to be found.