How to Rebuild Faith After Spiritual Struggles

Spiritual struggle encompasses a range of experiences that are worth distinguishing: intellectual doubt about doctrinal claims, the emotional dryness that accompanies extended difficulty, the disillusionment that follows a specific painful experience in the community of faith, and the sense of God's absence that accompanies severe suffering. Each has different causes and different appropriate responses, though they share the common feature of damaging the quality of the person's connection to God. What spiritual struggle is not, in almost every case, is evidence of permanent loss of faith. The psalmist who pants for the water brooks is not a person who has lost the desire for God — the panting is evidence of the connection. Thomas's demand for physical evidence is not a person who has given up on Christ — it is a person whose specific form of faith requires a specific form of encounter. The father's "help thou mine unbelief" is not a person outside faith — it is a person inside it and asking for more. Identifying what kind of struggle is being experienced often clarifies what kind of rebuilding is needed.

The common instinct during spiritual struggle is to either perform normalcy — continuing the practices of faith without engaging with the struggle — or to withdraw entirely from the practices until the struggle resolves. Neither is the biblical pattern. The psalms of lament demonstrate a third way: honest engagement with the struggle directed toward God rather than managed privately or expressed only horizontally. The father's "help thou mine unbelief" is directed at Jesus — the struggle is brought to the One who can address it rather than managed away from Him. Thomas's doubt is eventually addressed by the encounter with the risen Christ — but Thomas had to be in the room for the encounter to occur. One of the most important practical actions in rebuilding faith after spiritual struggle is maintaining the practices of engagement — prayer, community, Scripture — in the diminished and honest form that the struggle makes possible, rather than waiting for the struggle to resolve before re-engaging.

Jude's instruction to the community about people in spiritual struggle establishes a responsibility that flows in both directions: the person struggling benefits from the community, and the community has an active responsibility toward the struggling person. The isolation that spiritual struggle often produces — the sense that the struggle is unique, embarrassing, or disqualifying from community — is one of the primary obstacles to rebuilding, and it is an obstacle the community can specifically address. The person in spiritual struggle who is known to be struggling by at least one person in the community of faith has access to the prayer, presence, and compassionate engagement that Jude describes. The person who has withdrawn into private management of the struggle has not. One of the most concrete first steps in rebuilding after spiritual struggle is the honest naming of the struggle to one person within the community of faith — not the performance of resolved faith, but the honest identification of the struggle and the request for the specific form of community engagement that Jude describes.

The instruction in Revelation 2 — "do the first works" — provides one of the most practical rebuilding paths for a specific kind of spiritual struggle. The return to the specific practices that expressed the initial love for God — whether that was specific prayer, specific forms of Scripture engagement, or specific practices of generosity and service — is the concrete action that the instruction describes. Not the recovery of the feeling before the practices resume, but the resumption of the practices as the condition in which the feeling has the possibility of returning. This path is not always available or appropriate for every kind of struggle. But for the specific struggle of departed first love — the fading of the initial passion for God — it names the mechanism accurately: the first love was not only a feeling. It was expressed in specific practices. The return to those practices is the form the repentance takes.