Why Do I Feel Like God Has Abandoned Me?

You Are Not the First

If you feel like God has gone silent — like you are reaching into the dark and finding nothing — you are in ancient company. Some of the most spiritually serious people in history have passed through exactly this experience and used almost exactly those words.

David wrote: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest" (Psalm 22:1–2).

Job cried: "I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me" (Job 30:20).

Jeremiah — the prophet sent to speak God's word to an entire nation — wrote: "He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light" (Lamentations 3:2).

Jesus himself, on the cross, cried those exact words from Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Matthew 27:46). If the Son of God experienced the felt absence of the Father, this experience is not a sign of spiritual failure. It is part of what it means to be human in a broken world.

The Difference Between Feeling Abandoned and Being Abandoned

This distinction is not a dismissal of your pain — it is the most important thing in this article. Feelings of abandonment are real, they are painful, and they deserve to be taken seriously. But they are not reliable indicators of spiritual reality.

Psalm 22 — the psalm Jesus quotes from the cross — does not end where it begins. It begins in the darkness of felt abandonment and ends in confident praise: "For he has not despised or scorned the suffering of the afflicted one; he has not hidden his face from him but has listened to his cry for help" (Psalm 22:24). The feeling of abandonment was real. The abandonment itself was not.

God's promise is unambiguous: "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5, quoting Deuteronomy 31:6). The Greek in Hebrews uses a double negative — a grammatical construction that intensifies the promise to its absolute limit: I will absolutely never, under any circumstances, leave you.

Why Does This Happen?

There are several different reasons a person can feel distant from God, and they are not all the same:

1. Sin and Unconfessed Guilt

Isaiah 59:2 says: "Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear." This is the most straightforward cause — there is something in the relationship that has not been dealt with. If you have unconfessed sin, or a pattern of life that you know is wrong and have not repented of, that will create a sense of distance.

The remedy here is simple but not easy: honest confession and genuine turning. 1 John 1:9 promises: "If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness." The distance is real, but the door back is always open.

2. Spiritual Dryness — The Dark Night of the Soul

Not all silence is caused by sin. Medieval mystic John of the Cross described what he called the "dark night of the soul" — a season in which God withdraws the felt sense of his presence without withdrawing his actual presence. This is deeply disorienting and painful, but it serves a purpose: it strips away faith that depends on feelings and forces the believer to trust God on the basis of his word and his character, not on the basis of emotional experience.

C.S. Lewis, after his wife Joy died, wrote in A Grief Observed: "Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside." Lewis did not conclude from this that God was not there. He pressed through it, and eventually wrote: "When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze."

Many believers who have passed through this season report that they emerged with a deeper, less emotionally dependent faith than they had before. The dryness was not punishment — it was formation.

3. Depression and Mental Health

Depression has physiological and neurological dimensions that can make it impossible to feel anything — including the presence of God. Spiritual flatness during a depressive episode is not necessarily a spiritual problem. It may be a medical one.

This is not a modern secular invention. Charles Spurgeon — one of the greatest preachers in church history — suffered from severe depression throughout his ministry. He wrote candidly: "I could weep by the hour like a child, and yet I knew not what I wept for." He did not conclude that God had left him. He pressed on, preaching to thousands while personally in darkness, and he is remembered as one of the most spiritually vital people of the 19th century.

If you are in a prolonged season of flatness, numbness, hopelessness, or inability to feel anything — please speak to a doctor as well as a pastor. These things are not in conflict. God made both soul and body, and caring for both is wisdom.

4. Busyness and Neglect

Sometimes the distance is simply that — distance created by neglect. Not dramatic rebellion, just the gradual drift of a busy life. Prayer becomes occasional. Scripture reading stops. Church attendance gets irregular. And over months, the relationship that was once warm has grown cold.

James 4:8 promises: "Come near to God and he will come near to you." The felt distance is often a symptom of actual distance — and the remedy is to return. Not dramatically, not with great emotion, just consistently. Begin reading again. Begin praying again, even if the words feel hollow. Begin being with God's people again.

What to Do in the Darkness

Whatever the cause, here is what Scripture and centuries of Christian experience suggest:

• Tell God exactly how you feel. The psalms of lament model this — they are addressed to God, not just about God. "God, I feel like you're not there" is a better prayer than no prayer at all. He can handle your honesty.
• Keep the disciplines even when they feel empty. Read the Bible even when it feels flat. Pray even when it feels like talking to a wall. Go to church even when you leave unchanged. You are not manufacturing feeling — you are positioning yourself where God has promised to meet his people.
• Do not rely on feeling alone. Ground yourself in what God has said, not what you feel. He said he would never leave you (Hebrews 13:5). He said whoever comes to him he will never drive away (John 6:37). He said nothing in all creation can separate you from his love (Romans 8:38–39). These are facts, not feelings — and they hold when feelings do not.
• Tell someone. Isolation intensifies darkness. Find a pastor, a mature Christian friend, a counsellor. You were not made to carry this alone.

The Promise That Doesn't Move

Lamentations 3 was written by Jeremiah in the ruins of Jerusalem, surrounded by catastrophe and grief. He writes "he has driven me away" and "he has made me dwell in darkness." And then, in the middle of this devastation, he writes some of the most remarkable words in all of Scripture:

"Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope: Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness." — Lamentations 3:21–23 (NIV)

He does not say the darkness lifted. He does not say the feeling came back. He says he called to mind what he knew to be true — and that was enough. Hope is not the same as feeling. It is a decision to trust what God has said when what you feel says otherwise.

The God who was there on the darkest Friday in history — when his own Son cried out in desolation — did not abandon him. Sunday came. It always does.

"For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord." — Romans 8:38–39 (NIV)

For further reading: C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed is one of the most honest accounts of felt divine absence ever written. Martyn Lloyd-Jones's Spiritual Depression: Its Causes and Its Cure remains the most practically biblical treatment of this experience. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul is the classic mystical treatment. For the intersection of depression and faith, Ed Welch's Depression: A Stubborn Darkness (New Growth Press) is highly recommended.

Sources and references: Psalm 22:1–2, 24; Job 30:20; Lamentations 3:2, 21–23; Matthew 27:46; Hebrews 13:5; Romans 8:38–39; Isaiah 59:2; 1 John 1:9; James 4:8; John 6:37; Deuteronomy 31:6.