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...

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...

Between Grief and Glory: The Sacred Middle Where God Meets Us

There is a space in the Christian life that few people name and even fewer know how to hold.

It is the space after the prayer has been prayed but before it is answered.
The space after the loss but before new life has taken root.
The space where the old story has ended, yet the new one has not begun.

It is the space between grief and glory.

Many of the women I walk with find themselves here. Faithful. Still loving Jesus. Still showing up. And yet quietly weary. Quietly aching. Quietly wondering whether God still sees them in the middle of what feels unresolved.

This is the sacred middle.

And it is not a detour.

It is formation.

The Liminal Space We Rarely Acknowledge

Between grief and glory is a liminal place. It is unsettled, tender, and often lonely. It does not look like victory. It does not resolve neatly. There is no ribbon tied around it.

In faith spaces, we are often uncomfortable with what cannot be quickly r...

Raised in Violence, Rising in Faith: A Story of Christian Trauma Recovery and Hope

There are stories we bury because telling them feels like reopening a wound.

And then there are stories that, when spoken, become a doorway—not only for us, but for someone else who is still living in the silence.

Recently, I shared my story publicly for the first time in a long-form setting. Not because I am “fully healed.” Not because everything is resolved. But because I know what it feels like to wonder how to navigate grief as a Christian when your story includes abuse, betrayal, and loss.

And I know what it means to need Christian grief support that does not rush resurrection.

This is my story of Christian trauma recovery—and faith-based healing that did not erase grief, but met me inside it.

When Your First Memories Are Survival

I was born into violence.

My earliest memories include instability, neglect, and fear. As a child, I learned how to read the emotional temperature of a room before...

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...