What to Do When You Don't Know How to Pray Anymore

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There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing the ability to pray.

Not a sudden loss — not the kind that comes from one devastating moment. The slow kind. The kind where you sit down to pray one morning and notice, with a faint alarm, that the words are not there. And then you sit down the next morning and notice the same thing. And then a week passes, and a month, and what was once as natural as breathing has become something you approach with dread — or stop approaching at all.

If you are in that place right now, I want to begin by saying something important:

The inability to pray in the way you once did is not evidence that prayer has stopped being real. It may be evidence that God is inviting you into a different kind of prayer entirely.

The contemplative tradition — the stream of Christian spirituality that takes seriously the interior life and the long, often painful process of formation — has always k...

What John of the Cross Knew That the Modern Church Forgot

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I found them when I was drowning.

Not dramatically — the way we picture drowning from the outside. Quietly. The way a person drowns when they have been treading water for so long that the effort itself becomes the thing that exhausts them. I was in the darkest season of my life — shunned by a church community I had loved as family, my faith coming apart at every seam I had stitched together, unable to pray in any way that felt coherent, certain that what was happening to me was evidence of something uniquely, specifically wrong with me.

And then I found them.

The ancient witnesses. The ones who had been here before me — in the darkness, in the silence, in the long season where God felt absent and prayer felt like speaking into a void. They had not just survived it. They had written about it. With honesty and precision and a theological depth that the modern church has largely stopped passing on.

Finding them was a...

Six Types of Walls — And Why It Matters Which One You're In

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Not all darkness is the same.

And one of the most disorienting — and quietly harmful — things that happens when faith stops working is that we apply the wrong remedy. We treat a dark night of the soul like burnout, and wonder why rest is not helping. We treat a faith crisis like a personal crisis, and wonder why our circumstances improving does not make the questions go away. We treat a blowout like spiritual dryness, and wonder why discipline is making things worse.

The wall has different faces. And knowing which face you are looking at is the beginning of knowing how to stay.

This post is a companion to Episode 2 of the Through the Wall podcast series. If you have not yet listened, you are welcome to start there — or to begin here, and let this be your map.

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Why Finding Your Location Changes Everything

When you are at the wall — when faith feels dry, distant, or broken — the instinct is to work harder a...

When Faith Stops Working the Way It Used To

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There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not have a name in most Christian circles.

It is not burnout, exactly — though exhaustion is part of it. It is not depression, though the weight of it can feel indistinguishable. It is not a crisis of belief, though you may have begun to wonder if that is what it is.

It is the experience of waking up one day and realizing that faith — the faith you have practiced, built, tended, and sometimes fought for — has stopped producing what it once did.

Prayer feels hollow. Scripture feels distant. Worship feels like going through motions you no longer understand. And God, who once felt present and close, now feels somewhere behind a door that will not open no matter how many times you knock.

If you have found your way to this page, you may be living in that space right now. Or you may be watching someone you love live there. Or you may have been there once and are only now finding lang...