When healing does NOT come

Just read one of the most beautiful blog posts about faith-in-crisis, and hope you enjoy it as well.

When God Doesn't Show Up from lemmonythings.com.

I feel SO RELIEVED that someone has finally shared about their time when they felt NOTHING about spiritually and still stuck through it, and in the end, came out stronger for it.

For this is what I've gone through.

Please know that I know and understand how you feel. I know because I too carried the burden of bitterness inside me for a very long time. It came to the point that I dreaded General Conference because everyone around me would be excited about it, and I just didn't feel the same. I went to church because I wanted to believe and desire, but would return home disappointed, again, that I received no answer. I've been through temple sessions where I've emerged feeling a NUMBNESS that I know shouldn't be there, but am helpless to combat.

I know what it means to hunger and thirst for any/something to heal you, but all you see is a wilderness of spiritual-nothingness that stretches even beyond the horizon. In some rare instances, I would see a flash of spiritual light that would make me go, "Is this it? Am I finally getting my answer?" Then the light would fade, leaving me with a weird combination of hope and despair, like a marathon runner who sees a mile marker with no numbers on it: it keeps you going but you wonder exactly how much more you have to go. And sometimes, the only thing that kept me in church was a) stubborn pride (probably the only time when stubbornness and pride is a good thing), and/ or b) my intellect that kept recalling past experiences of spiritual highs. I knew that Heavenly Father loved me because I had seen His hand in my life before, but my pleadings to feel His love during those crisis-years came to naught. I kept up with my Book of Mormon reading because I knew it was true, but it did nothing to strengthen my spiritual or emotional state.

Thankfully it didn't take me a decade before I felt something positive about my faith again. Nonetheless I still recall the mental, emotional and spiritual loneliness, and the load of doubt and resentment I carried inside for a long time.

I hope I never have to go through this experience again, but I've emerged from it with a better ability to recognize God's love for me, and more significantly, I've experienced the sweet feeling of healing that comes from the atonement. 

So I beg those of you who are clinging on in silence-- keep holding on. Keep doing the best that you can. Please know that there is a God who is watching, and I testify that healing DOES come.

And finally, on a more light-hearted note:

Artist credit: Risa Rondil, from Pinterest. 

P.S. I hope this talk by Elder Neil L. Andersen helps you "keep swimming!"