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...

First Half Faith and Why God Doesn't Leave You There

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There came a point in my life where what I had done for the first eight years of my Christian walk no longer worked in my suffering.

Not because my faith was wrong. Not because God had abandoned me. Not because I had done something to disqualify myself from His grace.

But because the container I had been given — the spirituality I had been formed in — was not built for what I was now carrying.

And nobody told me there was another one coming.

If you have been in a season where the faith that once sustained you has stopped producing what it used to — where the disciplines feel hollow, the answers feel insufficient, and the God you thought you knew seems to have gone quiet — this post is for you.

Because what you are experiencing may not be a failure of faith. It may be an invitation into a deeper one.

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The Faith That Got You Here — And Why It Mattered

The first half of faith is the spirituality most of us wer...

Embodied Spiritual Formation: Healing Faith in the Body After Grief

To the wounded Christian grieving alone—

There is a particular kind of loneliness that comes when suffering outpaces language.

You still believe. You still love God. You still show up to church, open Scripture, whisper prayers when you can. And yet, your body tells a different story. Your chest tightens when you try to pray. Your shoulders stay raised, braced for impact. Your nervous system never quite settles, even when the words of faith are familiar.

Many faithful believers live here—caught between sincere belief and embodied exhaustion. We know what is true, but we do not feel safe enough to rest in it. This is not a failure of faith. It is a signal that grief has lodged itself somewhere deeper than cognition.

This is where embodied spiritual formation becomes not optional, but essential.

Why Faith Cannot Remain Only in the Mind

Embodied Spiritual Formation for Christian Grief Recovery

Christian formation h...

Why So Many Christians Are Seeking Soul Companionship

There is a quiet shift happening in Christianity.

It is not always loud enough to trend online.
It does not always come with public deconstruction stories.
But it is steady.

Many believers are not leaving Jesus.

They are leaving environments where their pain has felt unsafe.

They are searching for Christian grief support that does not rush resurrection.
They are longing for faith-based healing that honors the nervous system.
They are seeking spiritual mentorship that listens before it teaches.

This is not rebellion.

It is hunger for sacred presence.

When the Church Feels Busy but the Soul Feels Alone

An Invitation to Notice What Is Missing

For decades, churches have emphasized right belief, strong doctrine, and faithful service.

These are good gifts.

But many people quietly discovered that information alone does not heal trauma.
Correction alone does not soothe grief.
And busyness does not produce intimacy with God.

When ...

When Words Fail Us: Liturgy as a Shelter for Prayer

To the weary heart reading this—

There are seasons when prayer feels impossible.

Scripture does not deny this reality. It names it.

“How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1, NASB95).

Not because faith is gone, or because desire has dried up, but because the well of words is empty. Grief has a way of doing that. Trauma does, too. Suffering presses so deeply on the chest that even familiar prayers feel unreachable, as though they belong to someone else, in another life, before everything fell apart.

Many who come to Between Grief & Glory describe this moment with quiet shame.

I want to pray, but I do not know how. I believe God is near, but I cannot speak to Him. I open my mouth, and nothing comes out.

If this is you, let me say this gently and without qualification: you are not failing at prayer.

You are encountering the honest limits of language in the face of...