April 7, 2026

Do You Still Feel It?

Show Notes
Transcript

Most of us have felt it. Very few of us have said it out loud.

"I just don't feel it anymore."

Not angry at God. Not walking away. Just... flat. And honestly? That might be the scariest place of all — because we've been taught that faith is supposed to feel like something.

In the Season 2 finale of My Question for You, Melissa closes out The Language of Faith series with the phrase she believes is the most vulnerable of all. We're going to Psalm 88 — the only psalm in Scripture that begins in darkness and ends there — and back to Elijah under the broom tree. And we're asking the question that changes everything:

When the feeling is gone — is the faith still there?

If you're in a dry season right now, this one is for you.

📩 Get A Quiet Invitation — weekly encouragement in your inbox: https://preview.mailerlite.io/forms/1717098/165207819752047949/share

✨ Encouragement for your spirit. Wisdom for your walk.

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I want to start with something today that I think a lot of us have felt, but honestly, I bet very few of us have said it out loud.

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I just don't feel it anymore.

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Maybe it's a prayer that used to come easily and now feels like you're talking to the ceiling.

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Maybe it's worship.

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You're singing the words, you know the words, you've sung these words a hundred times, and they're just not landing the way they used to.

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Maybe it's your whole relationship with God that feels like it's gone a little quiet, not broken, not over, just a little flat.

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And the terrifying thing about that feeling, or maybe I should say, the terrifying thing about the absence of feeling is that we don't know what to do with it.

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Because we've been taught, at least implicitly, that faith should feel like something, that the presence of God should be tangible, that worship should move you, that prayer should feel like connection.

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And when it doesn't, we start to wonder, am I doing something wrong?

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Has something shifted between me and God?

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And is this what it looks like when faith starts to go away?

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Welcome to My Question for You.

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I'm Melissa, and today we are in the fifth and final part of the Language of Faith series.

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And this is also the season two finale.

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So this episode carries a little extra weight for me, and I want to honor that.

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We started this series by looking at the words we reach for when life feels uncertain and asking what those words actually say about what we believe.

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We've looked at hope and wishing, faith and optimism, realism and faithfulness, and seeing and believing.

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And today we're ending with what I think might be the most vulnerable phrase of all.

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My question for you today is this When the feeling is gone, is the faith still there?

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Okay, I want to start with something I think we need to name really clearly because I think it's at the root of a lot of unnecessary fear in our faith lives.

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Somewhere along the way, and I'm not sure exactly where it happens, but I think it happens for a lot of us.

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We start to equate the feeling of faith with faith itself.

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And when the feeling shows up, when worship moves you, when prayer feels alive, when scripture leaps off the page and lands somewhere specific in your chest, we call that faith.

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And when the feeling goes quiet, when prayer feels routine, when worship feels mechanical, and when you read the same verse you've loved for years and it just kind of sits there, we start to wonder if the faith has gone too.

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But the feeling is not the faith.

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Let me say that again because I think it's one of the most important things in this whole series.

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The feeling is not the faith.

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The feeling is a gift.

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The feeling is wonderful when it's there.

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The feeling can be an expression of genuine connection with God, but it's not the measure of whether the faith is real.

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Because if it were, if the presence of emotion was the evidence of faith, then faith would be the most fragile, inconsistent, unreliable thing in the world.

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And scripture never describes it that way.

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Faith, we've said throughout this series, is anchored to the character of God, to his covenant, to his track record, to who he has revealed himself to be.

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And none of those things change based on how your worship felt on Sunday morning.

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The feeling comes and goes, but God doesn't.

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Now, I want to take you somewhere in scripture that I think a lot of us have never been taken.

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And I want to start here because I think it's the most honest place to begin.

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Let's go to Psalm 88.

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If you've spent any time in the Psalms, you know that most of them follow a familiar arc.

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The psalmist begins in a dark place, crying, lamenting, asking where God is, and then something shifts.

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There's a turn, a declaration, a return to trust.

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Most psalms end in praise or at least in the direction of praise.

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But Psalm 88 doesn't do that.

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It is the only psalm in all of Scripture that begins in darkness and ends in darkness.

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There is no turn.

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There's no resolution, no closing declaration of trust.

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It just ends.

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Listen to how it opens.

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It says, Lord, you are the God who saves me.

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Day and night I cry out to you.

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May my prayer come before you.

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Turn your ear to my cry.

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That's Psalm 88, verses 1 and 2.

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And listen to how it ends.

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The very last line of the Psalm says, Darkness is my closest friend.

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That's Psalm 88, verse 18.

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That's it.

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That's where it stops.

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There is no resolution, no sunrise, no, but I will trust in you.

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Just darkness is my closest friend.

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And I want you to notice something about the fact that this psalm is even in the Bible at all.

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God did not edit it out.

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He did not require that the psalmist find the hopeful ending before it could be included in his word.

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He let it stand exactly the way it was, raw, unresolved, and honest.

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That tells us something important.

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God is not afraid of our darkness.

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He is not threatened by the seasons when the feeling is completely gone.

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He does not require us to perform our way to a nice, clean, tidy ending before he will sit with us.

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The psalmist who wrote Psalm 88 still began that with, Lord, you are the God who saves me.

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He brought the darkness to God rather than away from him.

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He still stayed in the conversation even when the conversation felt completely one-sided.

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That is a kind of faith, a quiet, costly, unromantic kind of faith.

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But it's still faith nonetheless.

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So now I want to go to somewhere we've been before, but I want to open a door we didn't go through last time.

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If you were with us back in season one, episode eight, you heard the story of Elijah under the broom tree.

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We spent time there talking about encouragement and what it looks like when God meets us in our exhaustion, when something simple and sustaining, God meets us with those things when we need it the most.

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But today I want to go back to that same moment, but I want to look at the language that Elijah uses because I think it's the most honest piece of language of faith in the entire Old Testament.

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Here's a little background, here's the context.

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Elijah has just experienced one of the greatest miracles in all of Scripture: fire from heaven on Mount Carmel.

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The prophets of Baal were defeated.

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An extraordinary, undeniable demonstration of the power of God.

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And then Queen Jezebel threatened his life.

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And something in Elijah breaks.

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He runs into the wilderness and he sits under that broom tree.

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And here's what he says to God.

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In first Kings chapter 19, verse 4, he says, I have had enough, Lord, to take my life.

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I am no better than my ancestors.

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Elijah says, I have had enough.

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That is language of faith, not triumphant faith, not even hopeful faith in that moment, but faith that is still talking to God from the floor.

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Faith that is still talking to God at the lowest point.

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And I want you to notice what Elijah does not say.

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He does not say, I'm done with you, Lord.

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He does not walk away from God entirely.

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He does not redirect his cry to someone or something else.

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He brings his exhaustion, his despair, his I have had enough directly to the Lord.

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That is what the language of faith looks like when you don't feel it anymore.

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Not performed confidence, not manufactured emotion, something that we just have to cook up.

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Just honesty directed at God.

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And what does God do with that?

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He doesn't lecture Elijah.

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He doesn't correct him.

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He doesn't say, after everything I've done for you, this is what I get.

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But instead, he sends an angel.

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He provides bread and water, and he lets Elijah sleep.

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And then he comes back again.

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In 1 Kings chapter 19, verse 7, he says, Get up and eat, for the journey is too much for you.

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The journey is too much for you.

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Not you are too weak for the journey.

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Not you are failing the journey, but the journey is too much.

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That is a statement of compassion, not disappointment.

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And then, and this is what I love most about this story.

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God doesn't change Elijah's assignment.

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He doesn't say, okay, since you're struggling, since you're weak, you can't handle anymore, we'll just find someone else.

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A call on Elijah's life doesn't go away because his feelings did.

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God replenishes him and he continues with him.

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He walks with him into what comes next.

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And that is exactly what God does with your, I just don't feel it anymore.

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So here's the question I want to sit with for just a few minutes, because I think this is where the rubber really meets the road.

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If faith doesn't depend on feeling, then what does it depend on?

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I think the answer is faithfulness.

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And I want to make a distinction here because those two words sound similar, but they're not quite the same thing.

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Faith is the orientation.

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It's the posture of trust toward God.

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Faithfulness is the practice, the choice to keep showing up, to keep acting in alignment with what you believe, even when the feeling isn't there to carry you through.

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It's the person who prays even when prayer feels dry, when it feels like it's going out into the void and no one's there to hear it on the other side.

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Not because they're performing, but because they've decided that the relationship matters more than the feeling.

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It's the person who keeps coming to worship even when they're not sure they'll feel anything.

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Not because they're going through the motions, but because they're saying with their presence, I believe you are here, Lord, even when I can't feel you.

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Not because the feelings have returned, but because faithfulness is the language of faith when feeling goes quiet.

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In Lamentations three, it's written from the deepest, darkest place of grief and loss, and it contains one of the most breathtaking turns in all of Scripture.

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It says Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.

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They are new every morning.

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Great is your faithfulness.

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Great is your faithfulness.

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That is written by someone sitting in the ruins of everything they had loved, someone for whom the feeling had not just gone quiet, it had been completely shattered.

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And yet they had the faith and the strength to say, Great is your faithfulness.

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Because the writer understood something that this whole series has been circling, God's faithfulness is not contingent on our feeling.

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And our faith does not require us to feel it in order to declare it.

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Before I bring this home, I want to just take a moment because this is the last episode of this series and the last episode of season two, and I don't want to rush past this.

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We started the language of faith asking a simple but important question.

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What do the words we reach for in our normal, unscripted moments of life actually say about what we believe?

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And here's what I think we found together over these five episodes.

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Our language is a window into our theology.

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The casual phrases, the ones that slip out when we're scared or tired or disappointed, they reveal the foundation we're actually standing on hoping or wishing, faith or optimism, realistic or faithful, seeing or believing, feeling or faith.

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In each case, the question wasn't whether you were using the words right.

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The question was whether the words were pointing to the right thing.

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Not to your own capacity, not to favorable circumstances, not to accumulated evidence or sustained emotion, but to the character of God, to his covenant, to his faithfulness that is new every morning, whether you feel it or not.

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That is the language of faith.

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And I hope that after these five weeks, the words you reach for, even in the hard, unscripted moments of life, are starting to shift.

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So let me bring this all the way down to where you actually live, where we are day to day in our normal lives, because I want this to land somewhere real.

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If you are in a dry season right now, if faith has felt flat, if prayer has felt like work, if the emotional connection to God has gone quiet, I want you to hear this.

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You are not failing your faith.

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Your faith may simply be maturing past the need for feeling to survive.

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The most durable faith is not the faith that always feels alive.

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It's the faith that keeps showing up even when it doesn't.

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So here are three things I want to leave you with for the dry season.

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First, bring the honesty to God, not away from him.

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Like Elijah, like the writer of Psalm 88, say exactly where you are.

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Talk to him.

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God is not surprised.

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He is not disappointed.

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He is already sitting with you in it.

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So take it to him and do not be afraid to share what you're really feeling and be vulnerable and honest with God.

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Second, practice faithfulness in the absence of feeling.

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Keep showing up, not because you're pretending, it's not what we want to do, but because your presence is its own declaration.

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It says, God, I believe you are here even when I can't feel you.

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And third, remember what you know when you can't feel what you know.

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God's compassions are new every morning.

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That was true the morning the psalmist wrote it in the ruins.

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It's true in your dry season.

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And it will be true tomorrow, whether the feeling returns or not.

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The feeling is not the faith.

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The faith is the faith.

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And the faith, even when it's dry and quiet and doesn't move like it used to, is still enough.

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Okay, before I let you go, I need to say a few things.

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And the first is just thank you.

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Thank you for being here for season two, for sticking it out with me, for showing up faithfully every week and listening to my message, and for taking some time out of your day to just connect with God.

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Thank you for asking the questions with me, for sitting with the hard ones, and for not looking away from the phrases that may have made you feel a little uncomfortable because you knew there was something worth finding underneath them.

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This season has meant so much to me, and I hope it has meant something to you too.

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If the Language of Faith series has stirred something in you, I want to encourage you to go back and listen from the beginning or share it with someone who you think needs to hear it.

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Word of mouth is genuinely how this podcast grows, and every time you share an episode with someone, you are extending this conversation further than I can carry it on my own.

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So for that, I also thank you.

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Now, here's what I want to say about what's coming up next.

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Season three is coming.

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And I'll be honest with you, I'm gonna say it's gonna be different.

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Not different in heart, not different in purpose, but deeper, more focused, and built with intention.

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We've spent the past two seasons asking questions together.

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And I think season three is gonna have some of the most important.

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ones we've come across yet.

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I'm really reaching to come up with questions that are thought provoking, that are challenging, that make us think about our faith a little different, think about the Bible and scripture and verses we've heard over and over and over to just think about them a little differently and to sit with them a little differently and ultimately in the end to grow closer to God.

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Not really tell you everything about season three just yet, but I want you to stay close.

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So subscribe if you haven't already and make sure you sign up for my weekly email.

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And if you haven't checked out the website in a while, visit myquestion4you.com, read my blogs that take you a little bit deeper into each of the episodes, and make sure you visit my store on the website for some designs with my question for you that my husband's created.

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So go to the website and check out the store.

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Tell a friend and keep your ears open because something good is coming.

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So I hope you'll stay with me and I hope you'll um continue this journey with me.

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And until then, keep asking, keep listening, and keep bringing the honest language of your faith to the God who already knows every word of it and who loves you anyway.

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Each week I send a short email called This Week's Question, a Quiet Invitation, and it's a simple reflection to help you stay grounded, to pay attention, to dive deeper into God's Word, and to walk with God throughout your week.

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You can sign up at myquestion for you dot com, bringing you encouragement for your spirit and wisdom for your walk.