Tonight I feel convicted. This post is going to be a very personal one about my faith and my struggles with it. I have not been as faithful as I would like to be over the last couple of years. I cannot wonder why God has been so quiet in my life when I know the answer; I have not been listening. I have been a believer in Jesus for a long time, more than ten years now, and in those ten years, I have had ups and downs in my walk with Christ. The blame for the downs lies solely with me, and God gets all the glory for the ups. That is just how it is. I am a flawed human being, and God is God. He does not make mistakes, and I do all the time.

I am going through a very dry period in my faith right now. God seems so far away, and my connection with Him now makes me feel like I’m in a pool of muddy water. I know He is there, and I can sense Him, but it is not as strong as it used to be. The fire is now a smoldering ember, and the passion for God is not what it once was. I used to be consumed by reading the Bible and learning as much as possible about it. I used to listen to online sermons multiple times a day, and I even attended church regularly. This has all fallen off since the pandemic. Honestly, it started to wane before that but being shut in made it all worse. Now, I feel like God and I are farther apart than we have been in a long time. That feeling sucks.

I take full responsibility for this. I am the one who allowed other influences to take precedence over my love and passion for the Lord and all He represents. Therefore, if my role as a Christ-follower is to be a good ambassador for the King, I am failing miserably. This is what we call Idolatry. There is a clear result when we put anything else ahead of or above the King. It leads to feeling disconnected and unhappy as if something is missing. But, of course, something is missing; God is missing.

What are the idols in my life that have taken God’s place? Pride is my greatest idol. I have a natural drive to want to do things myself. This drive may not seem like pride; however, when this drive drowns out God and has me relying on myself instead of remembering that my strength and abilities come from God, that is prideful. Another consequence of pride is my lack of communication with God. I have not been very consistent with my contact with the Lord. Prayer is how we talk to God, and the Bible is how God speaks to us. I have been failing lately on both of these. Another idol is wrestling. I mentioned in a previous post that I love wrestling. However, my “love affair” with wrestling encroaching on my time with God, time that should be His before anything else, is also a problem. I am sure other things need to be addressed, but these are the biggest ones, the greatest idols in my life right now.

What are the idols in your life? If you are a believer in Christ, you need to repent, turn from your idols and turn back to God. Being a Christian, I believe our God is forgiving. He loves us more than we can imagine and wants what is best for us. The critical point is that He ultimately knows what is best for us; we do not. We are like little children in the eyes of God. We need to submit to God and realize that, just like a loving father, His ways for us may not seem like the best for us now, but if we trust Him, it will be revealed that He is always right. So repent, cast your idols away and turn to God. This is what I am doing by writing this post and the follow-up steps I will take. I’ll save those for another post.