You Have Named a Dry Season

"O God, You are my God; I shall seek You earnestly; my soul thirsts for You, my flesh yearns for You, in a dry and weary land where there is no water." Psalm 63:1

You just named the season that is hardest to confess in ministry: the one where you keep showing up, keep serving, keep saying the right words, and feel almost nothing. You said it anyway. That took more courage than tears would have, and it is safe here.

Where You Are

The Desert rarely announces itself. It arrives gradually, the way a landscape dries: the worship set you led without being anywhere inside it, the Scripture that used to reach you now sliding past like words in a language you used to speak, the prayer requests you carry faithfully for others while your own prayers feel like letters with no address. In your body it often lives as heaviness, a flatness behind the eyes, the strange fatigue of feeling nothing while performing everything. And the numbness itself becomes the frightening thing, because you begin to wonder whether the feeling is gone for good, whether you have become a professional of a faith you no longer inhabit. Hear the truth about numbness, plainly, because it is likely no one has said it to you: numbness is not the absence of feeling. It is what a faithful heart does when it has carried too much for too long with no one to hand it to. The feeling is not gone. It is stored, and it has been waiting, perhaps for years, for a place safe enough to thaw.

With Yourself, With the Lord, With Others

With yourself, the Desert breeds a quiet self-accusation: you compare the woman you are now with the woman who once wept in worship, and you grade yourself a hypocrite. She is not gone, and you are not a hypocrite. You are depleted, and depletion is a condition to be tended, not a character verdict. With the Lord, the Desert feels like His silence, but the witness of every desert mother and father in the history of the church says otherwise: the dry seasons are where God does His most unadvertised work, beneath the surface, at the roots, where feeling cannot yet report on it. Your dryness is not evidence of His absence. It may be the very ground He is choosing to water. And with others, the Desert isolates through performance: everyone around you receives the ministry version of you, so no one knows to bring you water. Within this covenant, you do not have to perform thirst or its absence. You may simply keep showing up to the spring and let others draw for you a while.

How This Season Is Tended

The Desert is not tended by demanding that you feel. It is tended by gently rebuilding the pathway between you and your own interior life, one small noticing at a time, and by letting Scripture and presence come to you through company rather than through solitary effort, because in a dry season what is held communally often reaches what private reading cannot. There is no schedule for the thaw. You do not have to feel anything on time, or prove that the practices are working, or manufacture a single tear. Your only assignment is to keep coming to the water.

Begin Here

First, open the What Are You Really Feeling workbook?, one page at a time; it is not a demand to feel but a slow, honest way of finding language for what is underneath the quiet. Second, your VIM guide for this season, Awakened: Attentive to Presence, is at the button below; it will teach you the practice of holy noticing, which is precisely how a dry heart begins to perceive again. Third, let the third Thursday Lectio Divina be your first gathering, and pair it with the embodied awareness practices in your Audio Library at whatever pace your body allows.

May the roadway appear in your wilderness, may rivers surprise your desert, and may you discover that even here, between grief and glory, you are already held.