When You Feel Forgotten by God

How to reclaim your agency from despair

Photo by Elias Maurer on Unsplash

It’s not an easy feeling to describe. And you may not think it should be considered a feeling at all. But there is a felt experience with believing God has forgotten you.

You feel his cold indifference, his absence, the void he left when he removed not just favor, but his very eyes from you. It’s the ache of homesickness, the dread of lostness, without anyone looking for you.

I hope you don’t consider it unspiritual to talk like this. God did not think so. The wrestling is a part of Holy Scripture. As a friend used to say, “Complaining about God is a sin, but complaining to God is a psalm.”¹ God gives us the language to express ourselves when we feel forgotten. And as a result, we are not rendered powerless. God gives us the freedom to act when we struggle to find him.

David shows us how to reclaim our agency in three ways:

For the director of music. A psalm of David.

¹ How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
² How long must I wrestle with my thoughts
and day after day have sorrow in my heart?
How long will my enemy triumph over me?

Psalm 13:1-2 NIV

And there it is. Our first meaningful act. We can ask questions as an act of worship. David’s psalm was given “To the director of music,” which means that they would sing these questions together as an act of worship.

But how can that be? It’s because our longing for God expresses his worth. Just as saying, “I miss you.” expresses your love and honors the one you long for, so our honest prayers to God, for God, honors him, even when he feels far.²

David wondered if the God he loved, who saw him hidden in the sheepfolds, who looked past his appearance and into his heart, could still see him. For not only did he deal with physical pain (the triumph of his enemies), he dealt with shame (the taunt of his enemies), as well as mental and emotional pain. He couldn’t control his anxious thoughts. He was overwhelmed with sadness day after day, and wondered if this was evidence that God had forgotten him.

That’s when he begins his second act. He prays for clarity.

³ Look on me and answer, Lord my God.
Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death,
⁴ and my enemy will say, “I have overcome him,”
and my foes will rejoice when I fall.

Psalm 13:3-4 NIV

Praying for light for his eyes could have been a prayer for healing, or for outwitting his opponents. But it could also have been a prayer to see God correctly, lest he stumble in his faith, and his enemies rejoice in his fall.

To pray for light for our eyes is to be open to the truth. That while our feelings can be a helpful guide to our experience, it cannot be trusted as an accurate guide to God’s experience. We cannot rely on our emotions to tell us what God is feeling, thinking, or doing. In other words, our feelings are not facts. Like David, we should question the cold indifference, the absence, the void.

And this openness to clarity, to see God truly, leads him to do one more thing.

One final act.

⁵ But I trust in your unfailing love;
my heart rejoices in your salvation.
⁶ I will sing the Lord’s praise,
for he has been good to me.

Psalm 13:5-6 NIV

Consider everything that is outside of David’s control: He can’t help what he feels. He can’t fight his enemies on his own. If he is sick, he needs the Lord to heal him. He can’t control his thoughts or the sadness. He has to wait for God to answer.

And yet, he realizes that there is one thing that is still is in his control: he can sing with hope as an act of defiance against his doubts. It’s almost as if he reflects on all the things outside of his control and says, “But I, as for what I will do, I will trust in your unfailing love, rejoice in your salvation, and sing of your goodness to me in this moment.”

This kind of song is uncomfortable at first. As with many acts of faith, it doesn’t come naturally. In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talks about how to act our faith when we don’t feel it. Regarding love for God and neighbor:

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. [People] are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, “If I were sure that I loved God what would I do? When you have found the answer, go and do it.” (Mere Christianity)

You see — if we have expressed our questions as an act of worship, have prayed for clarity to see God truly, and are still lost on what to do next, applying this principle of acting before we “feel remembered” can help.

So I ask myself:

What would I do if I knew that God loved me more than anyone else in this world? That as I wake and struggle to get the crust out of my eyes, he crowns me with steadfast love in the morning? How would I act if his faithfulness to me stretches to the heavens? What would I do if his thoughts toward me outnumbered the grains of sand on the shore? How would I act if I knew that, as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed my sins from me, that it has been thrown to the very bottom of the ocean — no, that it was nailed to the cross of Christ with absolute finality? That this God, whom I fear has left me, was actually closer than my skin, living within me? What final act would I perform?³

I’d probably sing.

1. Shoutout to Doug Logan.

2. I first encountered this concept of worshiping God when longing for him in John Piper’s “A Hunger for God.”

3. Psalm 103:4, Psalm 36:5, Psalm 139:17-18, Psalm 103:12, Micah 7:19, Colossians 2:14, 1 Corinthians 6:19.