January 2024 – Krista Ortiz

When God Feels Far and His Love Nonexistent

I understand why people walk away from God. Might be a strange thing to hear me say as a Christian, and not only that, as a woman who has thrown her entire adult life into starting a church in NYC, but it’s true.

I know for myself that sometimes, because of something God allows or doesn’t allow, His action or His inaction, His words or His silence, God can feel far away, and His love? Yeah… well, that can feel downright nonexistent.

And I’ve experienced this multiple times throughout my life.

Summer of 2012, as I dropped my husband off at summer camp something felt off.

We had been youth pastors for years, and I knew well the excitement and exhaustion that came from taking loads of teens to camp every summer, but this feeling was different. It would be the first year I’d be unable to attend (with our daughter only 9 months old at the time and sleeping on the ground in 100-degree heat out of the question), but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t want to leave that day. It was more than just FOMO, something felt wrong and unsettling.

As I left for home that night with our daughter, leaving my husband behind at the campsite, I watched the entire camp staff gather in the outdoor barn to worship. I could hear their voices echoing as I drove past with my windows rolled down.

It was then that I felt God speak something simple and comforting to my restless heart: “There’s no reason to fear, I am with them.”

I took a breath of relief. God is there. Everything will be okay despite how I feel (…right?).

36 hours later I received a call from my husband that would have me asking him to repeat himself again and again, because what he was saying on the other end of the line was so heartbreaking and cruel, it was as if my mind was refusing to acknowledge what he was saying could be true.

What he proceeded to tell me was that a 15-year-old boy from our youth group had slipped into the river and had been pulled under the waterfall. Another counselor, a friend of ours, had slipped in as well; neither of them had surfaced yet. It had been 30 minutes.

We would spend the next two weeks attending their funerals, and years afterward reeling with heartache and questions.

They were supposed to be having fun at camp. Even more, that week they were coming to hear from you, God. I thought you said you would be there. I thought that meant things would be okay.

Believe me when I say, I know for myself that God can feel far away and His love mind-blowingly nonexistent.

A year later, God (first) called my husband and me to move to NYC. We had committed to do everything God told us to do, no matter the cost; we sold our house, our cars, and nearly all our possessions to move where He led us (which happened to be a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan)… only for our marriage to fall apart months after.

We were on the brink of divorce and thousands of miles away from our support system, and now I was feeling the weight of being a single mom in one of the most expensive zip codes in the world and looking up how to get food stamps so that I could get diapers should I need to leave my husband. All while knowing it was God who had led us to this place of hopelessness.

Where was God now? Where was the blessing in our obedience? My god…where was His protection?

And then there are these last few years, which have been some of the darkest and most confusing in my faith to date. After a plague-like 6 months at the start of 2020 came the cherry on top–I got pregnant miraculously, naturally, after many years of infertility, the very thing doctors had told us would likely never happen. And then, surrounded by lavender tissue paper and flowery cards, I miscarried on Mother’s Day.

It was far more than a miscarriage to me, it was a miracle lost. More than that, a miracle granted and then retracted. I had seen God in this. I thanked him every day for that pregnancy and took 18 pregnancy tests to revel in the real-life miracle God had done despite what the doctors had said. I had seen God’s power and felt His love, and then, I watched Him withdraw it and fade into the darkness. It will be 4 years in May with not a single positive pregnancy test since.

I remember a friend telling me upon hearing of this loss, and knowing the decade-long journey it had taken us to get to this place, that she had stopped mid-jog on her morning run that day around her quiet well-behaved suburban neighborhood in the South, to yell at the top of her lungs, WHAT THE HELL, GOD?

He did the miracle… and then He took it away… I just don’t see Him in this, she said to me later that day, waiting for anything I could say to relieve the tension she felt. A tidy bow? A happily ever after? A pretty verse promising better days and favorable outcomes? As a lifelong Christian herself, she was trying to understand.

But what I’ve learned is there are no bows and happily-ever-afters when you are living real-time drownings, when you are feeling the crushing weight of divorce or that diagnosis. When you experience your own personal tragedies…. (At least not yet.)

Some circumstances are just exceptionally dark and confusing. And sometimes in those circumstances, God can feel far as hell.

A man named Job felt a similar sentiment when he experienced unspeakable loss. He was a good man who had followed after God when the unimaginable and confusing shook his world to the core–in mere hours he lost all his wealth and every single one of his children.

Because of that, as one would expect, we find Job desperately looking for God in his circumstances.

He cries out with these words, “If only I knew where to find God… I go east, but He is not there. I go west, but I cannot find Him. I do not see Him in the north, for He is hidden. I look to the south, but He is concealed.” (Job 23, NLT)

No matter how hard Job tried, he was unable to find God in his circumstances. He too knew why people walk away from God. But a few verses later we find out why he was unable to find God in his circumstances. (It may be the same reason why you can’t find God in yours.)

In Job 23:17 Job goes on to say,

“Darkness is all around me;

thick, impenetrable darkness is everywhere.”

You see, Job’s circumstances were so dark, so impenetrably dark, he couldn’t see.

Don’t miss this: some circumstances are so dark and confusing we won’t be able to see God in them–when there is yet another school shooting or black slaying, after delivering a stillborn or receiving that awful diagnosis. When you miscarry on Mother’s Day after 8 years of infertility, all while Sally prays for a toothpick in the morning and it shows up at her door perfectly packaged with a bow by noon, to name a few.

There will be seasons where we will feel God near and bask in His goodness and the evidence we have of His Sovereign hand guiding our lives, and then others where we have to squint to see even the slightest glimpse of Him. You may reach for Him and not find Him, call out to Him, and receive no answer.

And don’t be surprised if, in your darkest circumstances, you can’t find a trace of His presence, nor a glimpse of His heart and His love.

But know this: that doesn’t mean He’s not there.

I remember God illustrating this to me when my family and I traveled to the Lake of the Ozarks in the summer of 2020 and toured an expansive (and dark!) cave that lies beneath Thunder Mountain called the Bridal Caves.

During our tour we made our way through the most scenic caverns, the darkness lighting up almost magically as we stepped into each new part of the cave. But towards the end of the tour, our guide suggested we experience what the cave would really be like, without the man-made lights illuminating our path. As we stood there in silence, we watched as each light in the cave ticked off, until we were standing in complete and utter darkness.

I had never been in such deep darkness in my life. I’ll never forget how completely helpless I felt. Disoriented. Even more, I’ll never forget how far away our guide felt.

Before the lights went out I had seen how close he was to me, no more than arm’s length away, but in the deep darkness, it was as if he wasn’t there at all. (And the same can be true of God.)

I think back to Job’s words… I cannot find [God], He is hidden. He is completely concealed….

But after acknowledging that he can’t find God, I love the verse that follows. Job continues, “But He knows where I am going….” (Job 23:10)

Job knew that even when He couldn’t find God in the darkness of his circumstances, God never —not even for a moment— took His eyes off of him.

Just like my guide in the caves that day, when we are forced to walk through dark and difficult things in this life, God can feel far. That’s not something we should be ashamed of, as much as it is something we should expect. But just because we can’t see God’s presence, doesn’t mean He isn’t there. Just because we don’t feel His love doesn’t mean God is not attentively watching our every move even when we can’t understand His. Even when everything feels like it’s being upended, our Guide is still very much in control when the lights go out.

Scripture tells us this, saying, “Whether silent or hidden, He’s there, ruling.” (Job 34:29-30, MSG)

Whether silent or hidden, active or seemingly sleeping in our storm. Whether His love feels near and palpably present, or if He feels far and His love nonexistent,

He’s there, ruling.

He’s there… and my goal in this season is simple: to find Him in my darkness. (Writing is how I always have.)

And my prayer for you is that as I write to find God in my own dark circumstances it helps you better find Him in yours.

Because God promises He’s there.

Next Post: Why are you hiding your pain? (There’s a better option.)

Where do I even begin?

Within the first two hours of waking up on my 35th birthday, I had cried all the makeup off my face.

It had been the first thing I had done when I woke up that morning: busy myself with getting ready in hopes that it would mask or, at the very least, distract from all the turmoil I felt inside. Then… it was as if I had put nothing on. Unlike times in the past when I had cried only to the point where black rivers of mascara stained my cheeks, this time the immensity of my weeping and sorrow had taken it all.

It was as if God started the first hour of my 35th year by saying, “Enough pretending, my child. You’ve been hiding your sorrow behind pleasantries and painted smiles long enough.”

Undeniably distraught (and newly bare-faced) that morning, I had asked my husband to meet me at the dining room table, where I confessed amid the quietness of that room and the secret turmoil I had been carrying inside, that I no longer knew why I was on this earth anymore. I didn’t like my life, I told him, and I feared I never would.

We sat there in silence. Our minds retracing the cost of the last decade, ever since our mid-twenties, when we admirably and somewhat naively chose to follow Jesus wherever He led — never envisioning the tragedies we’d walk, the suffering it would bring, the loss, the confusion, and the decade-long+ unanswered prayers.

My mind wandered, thinking of the beautiful woman with impeccable makeup who had jumped off a high-rise in Manhattan just a week earlier, and I wondered for a moment if she had ever sat around the dining room table and said similar things to people she loved…I don’t know why I’m on this earth anymore… I don’t like my life, I’m afraid I never will… if she had cried all the makeup off her face. I wondered if my husband was thinking of her as well.

I watched as he gathered himself calmly, doing his best to map a way “out” as he is so gifted in doing. And as he spoke of options: medications and connections he had to therapists in the city, his voice trailed off into the background of the deafening reality that was now at the forefront of my mind: This, had destroyed me. Even crazier, I knew it would. (Two years ago I nearly prophesied it.)

Two years earlier, while driving somewhere along I-95, and carrying a pregnancy I was told by doctors I could never have, I said something that had I not spoken out loud, I would never have remembered saying it at all.

For starters, whether I liked it or not, I knew God was using this miraculous pregnancy to get me to write again.

It had been many years since I’d written consistently on this blog. Quite honestly, I had stopped and never looked back. Until that moment…

Thinking back to all the previous posts on this blog, each detailing every miraculous provision in my life over the years, and then thinking of this pregnancy… this actual, real-life miracle after 8+ years of infertility… I knew I’d never be able to let this miracle that I now carried inside of me be left unspoken.

I’d have to write, I said.

My mind then trailed to a different thought, a heavier reality. One in which I would be forced to write even more… and that was if this pregnancy didn’t result in a baby.

Imagining (yet another) miscarriage, the years and years of infertility, and the ugliest of emotions that I knew – all too well — would follow suit. The confusion I’d no doubt grapple with if God were to grant me this miracle after nearly a decade, only to then take it away….

And that’s when I said these words that now resounded in my mind, “If I lose this pregnancy it will destroy me… And the only way I know how to get out of a pit that deep and dark is to write my way out of it.”

It would destroy me, I had said.

Now, two years later, while sitting around the dining room table on my 35th birthday, I had been right… I would lose that last pregnancy and, when I did, it would destroy me in such a profound and humiliating way that it would take me years to admit it.

Losing – yet another — pregnancy destroyed my identity as a woman. Not just regarding my ability to have children (which is real, and feels like it should be your right), but also chiseling away, if not wholly obliterating, the kind of woman I’ve been created to be. Transforming me from the vulnerably honest and real-to-the-point-of-being-raw woman I’ve been known throughout my life to be, to a woman who hides away, excusing herself and her mess from the world because she can’t bear to crumble at another pregnancy announcement or combat that look people don’t realize they give when they hear the magnitude of my pain and my faith questions.

Unrecognizable as the wholehearted woman I used to be, the severity of my un-dealt with pain now had me numb to the point of becoming robotic, while in another moment I’d fly into a rage I never knew I was capable of. At times the severity of the pain had me questioning the purpose and future of my life, knowing full well why people keep drinking or jump off tall buildings.

It was clear, I was not who I used to be. But I wasn’t the only one… God wasn’t who I thought He was either.

Losing that pregnancy felt like God set me up, led me astray, dangled the carrot of a miracle, and then cruelly snatched it back, watching me crumble and reduce to nothing when He did.

For that reason, over these last 3 1/2 years, I’ve given God the silent treatment for longer stretches than ever before, and other times (more notably) a piece of my mind.

Because of the magnitude of my confusion and frustration in this last season, I now have worship songs I can barely stomach (I skip them on the playlist as fast as I can) and verses I find so conflicting that I’ve scribbled curse words in the margin of my Bible to stomp my feet in rebuttal.

Quite frankly, the God I love and have trusted and sang about every Sunday was no longer acting in the character of who I thought Him to be either — and not only was my confidence in Him destroyed, but equally destroyed was my confidence in His supposed “perfect plan” for my life.

Not only did I know full well why people keep drinking or jump off tall buildings, but what I also came to understand is why people walk away from their faith forever, middle finger up in the air blazing. And I told God that.

And His response? Well, it will surprise you… (it surprised me.) Just five words in response to each of my harshest accusations (and they are the same words I believe God desires to speak to each of yours.)

God simply replied, “I can speak to that….”

In a passage deep in Ezekiel, there’s a verse tucked away in a chapter about restoration that speaks powerfully to God’s character when we’re standing in the wreckage of our lives, and in need of reviving.

Ezekiel 36:3 begins with God speaking to the people of Israel who needed restoration of their own, saying to them, “….Give the mountains of Israel this message from the Sovereign Lord: Your enemies have attacked you from all directions, making you the property of many nations and the object of much mocking and slander.”

God is saying, I see what you have gone through, and I know the blows it has taken to your faith and spirit. (But He doesn’t stop there…)

The next verse goes on to show us something interesting about God, saying, “Therefore, O mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Sovereign Lord. He speaks to the hills and mountains, ravines and valleys, and to ruined wastes and long-deserted cities that have been destroyed and mocked.” (Ezekiel 36:4)

Don’t miss this. He speaks to the hills and mountains, ravines and valleys, and ruined wastes and long-deserted cities….

In this passage, God not only acknowledges how cruelly the people have been treated, and how perilous the terrain we can sometimes find ourselves on in this life, but He also reveals His ability and desire to speak to it.

You see, not only does God see what’s happened to us, but He desires to speak into it. — All of it.

God wants to speak to the hills and mountains in our lives; the daunting things we are up against, that feel immovable. Impassible, even. ~~Even when~~ Especially when the hopelessness we are up against is somewhere He led us to.

God wants to speak into our ravines and valleys, the low and windingly dark places we’ve had to walk unbeknownst to those around us. (Our darkest and lowest moments always are, out of the line of sight of others and far beyond the facades and flashiness we display on our Instagram or Facebook.) Yet even when our most punishingly difficult journey has remained unnoticed by others, there’s never been a step we’ve taken, or a scar we bear, that has ever escaped Him.

Not only that, God desires to speak into the ruined wastelands, the places in our lives that were once brimming and blossoming, and now feel ruined beyond repair — even when it’s us who are unrecognizable from who we once were, and our spirits and hearts are the ones in disrepair.

And maybe the MOST significant thing God has the ability and desire to speak to…

“He speaks to the…long-deserted cities that have been destroyed and mocked.” — This is God saying He could speak to the places in our lives and hearts where we feel He’s most abandoned us. (Perhaps where we even have evidence of it.)

Looking back over the last 3 years, I realize it’s the areas of my life where I feel God has most deserted me that have left me the most destroyed.

Maybe the same could be said of you.

Maybe like me, your decade-long prayers for deliverance have continued to go unanswered, leaving you empty-handed and receiving only one thing in abundance from the God of “immeasurably more” and that’s His silence on the other end of the line. Leaving you to feel forgotten by the very same God everyone speaks so highly about every Sunday, and on an especially bad day, forsaken by Him.

Maybe like me, there are dates on the calendar marking when your heart broke and when your world stopped, and with that, God’s love for you became murky.

Your faith has been rocked and your heart rattled, watching the cruel and confusing things God allowed entry into your life. And now, you beat back a voice that taunts you with, “Why would God have allowed this?” and “Where was He when ______ happened?” Questions you fear you may never have the answer to and that berate you with every step you attempt to take forward.

I get it. Believe me, I do… But what if I told you that was to be expected? The questions. The murkiness. The rattled heart and shell-shocked faith. (Journeying over hills and mountains, down ravines and valleys is far from a cakewalk, after all.)

What I’ve learned through my own treacherous faith journey these last few years is that when we can’t see God’s heart, when we don’t understand His silence, when we feel rejected by His inaction, that’s when our faith becomes most shattered. —And yet it’s into those exact places of our lives and hearts that God desires to speak!

It is there that God unflinchingly responds to our deepest pain and harshest accusations, saying, “I can speak to that… All of it! I can speak to whatever has destroyed you and your confidence in Me.”

That’s why I’m writing again. Because God made it clear to me around the dining room table that day exactly two years ago, I can’t pretend I’m okay any longer. I couldn’t, even if I rallied all my best efforts and most impressive church-appropriate behavior. (I know because for years I’ve tried.)

God is inviting me instead: to acknowledge that my circumstances have destroyed me more than I like to admit, that I feel more deserted by Him than I could have ever expected, and that writing is the only way I know how to get myself out of a pit this deep and dark. To acknowledge in fact, that sometimes it feels like my life and faith depend on it.

And even more, to allow God to speak into it — All of it. (He is inviting you to do the same.)

Perhaps God brought you here to this little cob-webbed corner of my abandoned blog to hear Him say the same words He said to me a year ago: “Enough pretending, My child. You’ve been hiding your sorrow behind pleasantries & painted smiles long enough.”

No more pretending away your pain. No more masking your sorrow and hiding how you feel in the name of faith. No more isolating yourself and your mess from the world and no more silent treatment with the God you don’t (right now) understand.

Cry all the makeup off your face if you need to, but know when you do that there is a God in heaven who not only sees what has destroyed you and your confidence in Him, but who also wants to speak to it. Saying, there’s nothing too daunting or irredeemable that we’ve walked through, and nothing too harsh we’ve believed about Him that He cannot, or does not desire to, speak into.

It’s where we have to begin.

Next Post: When God Feels Far and His Love Nonexistent

It’s time to set this place on fire. (I need to speak with the King.)

It was New Year’s Eve, four years ago, that my life was launched into a disorienting plague-like set of misfortunes that would rattle my faith and leave me reeling.

It was then that I scribbled a secret declaration to myself and God in my journal. Because of what I was enduring and how cruel it all felt, I vowed: either I would silence my voice forever (never writing, preaching, or even posting on social media again) or, one day, I would come back louder and more honest than ever before and burn the whole place down with my honesty.

For years I have chosen silence… this abandoned blog is only part of the extent of that decision…

but this year I’m trying something different.

In 2024 I choose fire.

Tucked away in the Bible is a wild story with an invitation to set some things on fire, and with it, hope that our proximity to God might change if we did.

In 2 Samuel, a man named Absalom is hiding, similar to the way I have been hiding over the last few years. It is during this time that the king, his father, decides to send for him, bringing him to the city of Jerusalem.

But that’s when something confusing happens….

The king brings him there, but why?

2 Samuel 14:28 says, “Absalom lived in Jerusalem for two years, but he never got to see the king.”

To say Absalom was confused is an understatement. Absalom would send messages asking for his father, but he would not come. Even when he tried to have others intercede on his behalf, the king still refused.

It had been years… yet Absalom never, not once, saw the king. Instead, the king brought Absalom to a place, only to–confusingly and infuriatingly–leave him there, for years. With not a single word spoken. (And I feel like God has done the same to me these past 4 years. Maybe you feel the same way.)

It’s been years since my life was rattled and my heart shaken during those dark and disorienting days of 2020. Worse than that, I’m still in that dark room, reeling. Reeling for revelation of God’s heart in this, reeling with questions–what, if anything, could be the purpose in all of this? But I hear nothing.

God brought me here, and confusingly and infuriatingly it feels like He has left me here, with not a word spoken.

For the record, I believe in a God near to the brokenhearted, yet I’ve learned there are some things God will allow us to walk through where we won’t be able to find even a passing shadow of His loving presence. (For a time at least.)

I believe in a God who holds the power to still the waves and the wind no matter how tumultuous they may be, but I have watched how, despite my boldest and most unceasing prayers, He didn’t.

I see how scripture models for us how we can cry out to God for wisdom and understanding. Yet, I have sat on the receiving end of God’s silence for years now, without a single revelatory word spoken around why He allowed what He did, or more frustrating, why He continues to have zero urgency in setting things right moving forward (despite all the lovely prayers prayed and people who have laid hands on me.)

It’s been years… and I have not heard God nor seen His presence in my circumstances, and, quite frankly, I’m infuriated about it. Perhaps you are as well.

The good news is, we aren’t the only ones infuriated that we are being put off and seemingly ignored. Absalom was too, and as the passage continues, we watch the great lengths he went to *finally* get the king’s attention when quite literally, he set some things on fire.

2 Samuel 14:30 says that after being put off by the king for years, ‘… Absalom said to his servants, “” Go and set fire to Joab’s field….’ so they set his field on fire as Absalom commanded.” Later in the passage when others inquire why he would do such an unruly and outlandishly out-of-bounds thing like setting the king’s military commander’s field on fire, Absalom’s response is both epic and simple: “I need to speak with the king.” (verses 31-32)

I love that. I need to speak with the King. (Me too, Absalom. Me too.)

In short, Absalom was saying, clear the king’s calendar, I refuse to be ignored any longer. I will do whatever it takes to find the king even if it means setting some things on fire…. And this year I feel the same way.

For years I have chosen silence and hiding. I thought that was the appropriate, well-behaved-little Christian thing to do (especially when your angst is with God–more on this later.) I have searched relentlessly for God in this confusing place where He’s led me.… I thought for sure I would have heard something from Him by now, or better yet, that I would’ve watched His redemption sweep over my darkest days…but nothing. My continued silence has only been met with His.

But then there was that other option, God reminded me. Remembering back to the words I had penned in my journal four years ago: silence my voice forever OR burn the whole place down with my honesty…

And this year I feel God welcoming the latter.

“Choose fire.” I can feel God saying, “Set this place ablaze with your honesty, my child. I welcome it, I can handle it, and more than that, I will meet you there with compassion.”

(It’s what the king did with Absalom.)

2 Samuel 14:33 says after Absalom set some things on fire, “Then at last [the king] summoned Absalom, who came and bowed low before the king, and the king kissed him.”

Because he was willing to do whatever it took–even something unruly and outlandish–Absalom was reunited with the king. At last, and after all the years, he was finally ushered back into the king’s presence and on the receiving end of the king’s kindness. And all because he dared to set some things on fire. And God is inviting me to do the same. Even if it’s only to set fire figuratively with my honesty (though mark my words, it will be no less explosive.)

While I’ve written through a wide range of raw and unedited topics on this blog over the years (pornography, my near divorce in 2014, miscarriage(s), and my ever-evolving and dissolving relationship with my father, to name a few)

This time, the mess God is inviting me to write through are my issues with Him… *gulp*.

Even still, God is unflinching.

And while there may be curse words hurled, punches thrown, and topics covered that may have me regretting having gone that far or saying that out loud, I can honestly say that if it means that, at last, I too, could see the King in my current circumstances, if it means that after all these years of separation and dissention, that I could bask in His loving presence again, or come to understand why it all had to be this way (or at the very least, that I could see some good come from it)…if there’s –even a chance–that my (at times fiery) honesty could break through His silence, then it will be worth it. At the very least it will be cathartic.

All I know is I’m not waiting around another year to be summoned any longer.

2024 is the year I’m taking things into my own hands.

It’s time… light the match… I need to speak with the King.

Next Post: Where do I even begin?