Spiritual Dryness, The True Fire of Love

Few of us pine for dry seasons, spiritually speaking.

And why would we? The disorientation of the lost sense of God, distraction and hardness in prayer, a bleak self-consciousness of our own sin and brokenness and the disappearance out of nowhere of the experiences of God that enliven us.

It’s painful. Especially if we’ve not changed anything in our prayer and gospel living.

I’ve experienced these seasons en masse in my spiritual journey. I’ve had times of experiencing God’s incredible kindness and grace, where it’s felt as if I’ve been so totally engulfed in him it would be impossible to imagine a second of dryness would ever come.

I’ve also had long stretches, of sometimes years, with only a few of these moments punctuating an incredible dryness in prayer and a sense of God’s being ‘somewhere else’.

But where I used to panic over those stretches, I’ve learned to embrace them. I now experience them as a deeper calling, a holy invitation to the fire of love.

We could think of it like this, the more dehydrated the wood, the quicker and greater the flame when ignited. Because although rain is critical for fruitfulness, only the truly dry can ignite a wildfire.

And so God arrives to us in both.

Seasons of rain, of spiritual nourishment, fruitfulness and felt experience.
And seasons of drought, when our love for God, and not his gifts, is most truly proven.

If we leave God when the comforts leave, we only prove it’s his hands, not his heart we truly want. But if we love and offer our lives to God in the drought, we’re awakened to true, enflaming love.

That love is the deepest burning.
It’s the fire God aches to ignite in each and every one of us.

This true fire of the Spirit arrives not in the ways we necessarily long for or enjoy, but in the purging of our selfish desires for the in-coming gift of a pure love.

That gift arrives to us in the drought, because it’s only by giving ourselves away there that our love can become wholly true.

So may you today, in this moment, embrace the dry-fire of love, loving God for his person, for his inherent value, and not for the rains he so affectionately sends, that you may commune with him in the permanent vitality he made you for - unceasing union.

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