What to Do When Prayer Feels Dry

There will be seasons where prayer feels like talking into an empty room. The words come out the same way they always have, but nothing on the other end seems to be listening back. If you're in that season, you're in good company. David wrote entire psalms from exactly this place.

The Bible has words for the dry season

Open the Psalms and you find people who knew exactly what this feels like.

"O God, You are my God. Earnestly I seek You; my soul thirsts for You. My body yearns for You in a dry and weary land without water." (Psalm 63:1, BSB)

The heading of that psalm says David wrote it in the Wilderness of Judah, a literal desert. He used the landscape around him to describe the landscape inside him. The sons of Korah wrote something similar: "My tears have been my food both day and night, while men ask me all day long, 'Where is your God?'" (Psalm 42:3, BSB).

The fact that these prayers are in the Bible tells us something important. God does not only want to hear from us when we feel close to Him. He included the dry prayers in His own book.

You are not the first

Christians through the centuries have written about this. In the 1570s, the Spanish writer St John of the Cross described what he called the dark night of the soul: a season when God seems to withdraw and prayer feels empty, which he believed God uses to purify and deepen faith.

Perhaps the most surprising example is Mother Teresa. Her private letters, published ten years after her death, revealed that from 1948 until almost the end of her life in 1997 she rarely felt God's presence in prayer. Yet she kept praying, and kept serving the poorest people of Calcutta every day. Her feelings were dry. Her faithfulness wasn't.

C.S. Lewis explained the pattern well in The Screwtape Letters. Human beings, he wrote, are part spirit and part body, so we live in time and our feelings rise and fall. He called it the law of undulation: peaks of feeling followed by troughs of dullness, over and over. Lewis's surprising point was that the troughs are not wasted. The senior devil in his book admits that prayers offered in dryness are the ones that please God most, because they are offered by someone choosing to obey without being paid in feelings.

Dryness is not distance

Dryness is not evidence that God has left. It's often evidence that your faith is maturing past the need for a feeling to validate it. Keep showing up anyway. The discipline you build in the dry season is what carries you through the next one.

God's promise does not depend on your sense of it: "Never will I leave you, never will I forsake you" (Hebrews 13:5, BSB). Isaiah speaks directly to the believer who feels in the dark:

"Who among you walks in darkness and has no light? Let him trust in the name of the LORD; let him lean on his God." (Isaiah 50:10, BSB)

Notice that Isaiah doesn't say the person in darkness has done something wrong. He says: lean.

Five ways to keep praying

Try changing the shape of your prayer instead of abandoning it. Pray Scripture back to God word for word. Write your prayers instead of speaking them. Sometimes the dryness is asking for a different container, not less devotion.

1. Pray the Psalms. When your own words feel empty, borrow the psalmists'. Psalm 42 and Psalm 63 were written for exactly this season. Read one slowly and make each line your own.

2. Write it down. A journal slows your mind and gives you a record. Months later you may read back and see answers you didn't notice at the time.

3. Be honest about the dryness. Tell God plainly that it feels like nothing is happening. The psalmist did: "Why do You hide Your face from me?" (Psalm 88:14, BSB). Honesty is still prayer.

4. Check the basics. Sometimes dryness has ordinary causes: exhaustion, grief, an unconfessed sin, a phone that interrupts every quiet moment. Sleep, confession and a little silence can make a surprising difference.

5. Pray with others. When you can't pray well alone, let a church, a prayer partner or your family carry you. Their faith can hold you up while yours feels thin.

Wait for the Lord

Seasons change. The same psalm that begins in thirst ends in hope: "Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him for the salvation of His presence" (Psalm 42:5, BSB). That little word "yet" is the whole posture of dry-season faith. I don't feel it now. I will yet praise Him.

"The LORD is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD." (Lamentations 3:25-26, BSB)