We have the universal wake-up calls of sin, aging, disease, and death to keep our longings aimed at eternity, but the contrast between Mount Pleasant and heaven doesn’t always seem so stark. Seeking to build heaven on earth is a recipe for numbness. When we tie our life to those of the poor, the fatherless, the widow, or the refugee, we not only heed the heart of God but also remember more regularly the brokenness of our current age.

The landscape of college ministry has shifted dramatically over the past 25 years. But here in 2025, I’m still consistently receiving the same question that I asked as a student: “Why am I not feeling it?”

Why am I not more excited about Jesus? Why doesn’t the gospel taste sweeter to me? Why are my emotions not responding to the best news in the world? I have a wealth of Christian resources, but I’m still desperately grasping for joy. Why does it stay tantalizingly out of reach?

Two Common Diagnoses

Before we go further, it must be said that the majority of those who experience this kind of unwelcome numbness are not fully numb. They are selectively excited. They still find themselves giddy about gaming, wild about the weekend, or captivated by a crush. It’s the spiritual pursuit, or perhaps the very nature of God, that douses the flame.

Years ago, I was leading a weekly Bible study of sophomore men. At the beginning of each meeting, one of these sophomores was playful, energetic, even squirrely. But almost without fail, his eyes would begin to droop when we would open the Bible — as if some form of yet-undiagnosed, Scripture-induced narcolepsy had seized him. (My children are often afflicted with the same strange condition.)

While this was an embarrassingly overt case, parallel stories of selective excitement remain common, and there are generally only two diagnoses.

Spiritually Dead

On the one hand, the person has yet to develop a taste for God at all. Scripture clearly states that God turns on the lights of Christward affection in our hearts (2 Corinthians 4:6), but before that wonderful awakening, we are prone to be bored by anything that doesn’t directly or indirectly exalt ourselves. So the Bible, which humbles us on every page, is somewhere between repulsive and boring, and talk of God evokes a response akin to Edmund’s at the first mention of Aslan’s name.

If you are reading this and deeply concerned that you are of that number, I am less concerned than you are — precisely because you’re unsettled. It is far more likely that you fall into a second category.

Spiritually Distracted

In this case, the person isn’t “feeling it” because he has been nibbling on lesser joys, like a child who has no appetite for a steak dinner because there are a dozen candy wrappers in his pocket. I confess that I often live here, surprised by my lack of hunger for the living God but slow to consider how I have given myself to the seemingly innocent distractions of little phone games or ESPN throughout the day (or throughout the season). As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Having allowed oneself to drift, unresisting, unpraying, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires,” we are then shocked at our lack of spiritual fervor (The Great Divorce, 38). We make a mockery of David’s singular aim of God-gazing in Psalm 27:4, betraying our true practice in this ungodly paraphrase:

Twenty-six things have I asked of the Lord, and those will I seek after . . . gazing upon his beauty is peripherally one of them.

So, if your affections for God aren’t accurately reflecting the goodness of who he is, first take an honest inventory of your prayer life, your thought life, your diet, and (perhaps especially) your screen time. Perhaps you will find that you are an average hyper-stimulated citizen of the twenty-first century, giving in to secular liturgies with every free moment.

When the Dryness Remains

But when that inventory is taken, the competing liturgies are stripped away (or at least taken captive to the obedience of Christ), and that spiritual dryness remains, what then? What of the seasons when I put my head under the normal waterfall of grace, and I still feel thirsty? Or worse, when my thirst is as weak as the trickle that falls from the expected fountainhead? What if, like Heman the Ezrahite in Psalm 88, “Every day I call upon you, O Lord; I spread out my hands to you,” but “I suffer your terrors; I am helpless” (Psalm 88:9, 15)?

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