How Can I Feel God’s Love for Me Again?

My sister is a Physical Therapist. Her job is to help people feel again. I suppose what she really does is help people overcome their pain so that they can find joy in life again. After every fracture comes a process of reconstruction. When you first remove the cast, you’ll find the muscles around the bone shriveled and weak. The longer the cast is on the more dramatic the effect on the muscle. But given enough time and attention, healing is inevitable.  

For the longest time after my faith fractured, it felt as if my soul was in a cast. You could call it a dark night of my soul. It was a season of waiting and wrestling and wondering how things would turn up. It was a season of rebuilding and reordering everything in my life again. Old practices that I once was so familiar with had lost their flavor, but in their place new rhythms surfaced. They were born out of a place of healing. They became rhythms of delight. I stopped going through the motions. I had no energy left to hide. It was scary but it was also freeing. It was work that needed to be done. 

When the cast was finally removed off of my soul, I wondered if I would ever feel again. My soul felt shriveled. I wondered if I would ever experience God’s love again. I wondered if I would ever experience joy again. I wanted my life to be real. 

Little by little I noticed that a transformation had taken place. As my faith muscles grew stronger, I learned to feel joy again. The more I practiced listening, the better I got at hearing God’s whispers. The more time I spent alone with God, the more I trusted his goodness. The less expectations I put on my relationship with God, the more I was able to honestly tell him the desires of my soul fully expecting him to tenderly care for me. 

Do you ever worry that you’ve forfeited the right to experience God? Do you worry that you’ve gone too far and that you are past redemption? You couldn’t be further from the truth. 

We spend so much time thinking that we’re supposed to find our way back to God. Yet freedom and joy are born out of the understanding that it is God who has already found his way to us. 

God is waiting for you with open arms. Isn’t it time to run into his waiting embrace and experience his deep love for you once more?