When Peace Feels Distant
How do you find peace when God seems distant and everything feels like it is conspiring against you? The ancient psalmist has an answer.
"As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?" - Psalm 42:1-2 NIV
Carolyn sat in her car parked outside the church she'd once called home. Six months since the diagnosis that shattered her certainties. "We just have to pray more," someone had said.
But prayer felt like shouting into silence. Like the psalmist's mockers asking "Where is your God?" -- well-meaning voices offered explanations that only deepened her isolation. Yet something kept drawing her back here, week after week, even if she couldn't go inside.
The ancient songwriter knew this territory - this space where peace feels like a distant memory. His words map the geography of spiritual drought, that stark landscape where easy answers evaporate, and God seems unreachable. Like many of us, he alternates between despair and determination, between drowning in circumstances and gasping toward hope.
Yet something profound happens in this honest wrestling. The psalmist creates space for a different kind of shalom - not the peace of easy certainty, but the peace that comes through holding both reality and hope in the same breath. "Why are you downcast, O my soul?" he asks himself, acknowledging the pain while still whispering "Yet I will praise him."
This is how peace sometimes works - not by removing our struggles, but by teaching us to breathe when we feel we’re drowning. Not by explaining away our questions, but by giving us strength to live within them until dawn breaks again.
Today's Thought: Where do you need to give yourself permission to be honest about spiritual struggle? What would it mean to find peace, not despite questions, but within them?
Photo by Sinitta Leunen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/unrecognizable-woman-sitting-in-car-5902147/
