December 1, 2003
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Steps to Distancing Yourself from God
(Steps I don’t recommend yet fall into quite often.)Step 1. You experience a trial, difficulty, something painful, displeasurable, adverse to your desires or expectations.
Step 2. You say to yourself, I can’t (don’t want to) deal with the pain right now [so you ignore it, push it aside]
or I don’t have time to think about it right now [and refuse to think about it]
Step 3. Repetition of Step 2 for several days
Step 4. The pain/trial becomes something unthinkably dreadful hanging over your head like a dark, ominous cloud. It’s now built up in the back of your mind so much that it just feels like something too overwhelming and impossible to deal with. So you continue to push it away.
Step 5. Your prayer times have gone from short, surfacecy and superficial to nonexistent. You have, at this point, effectually shut God out.
Step 6. Congratulations! You now recognize the feeling of Emptiness and Distance from God. “I can’t hear God anymore,” is the general feeling you have.
[The question you now must face is, How do I get back to God? The answer lies in searching His heart.]
Moral: Press into the pain!! Deal with it as soon as possible, so you can avoid these Steps to Distance.