Love Day #20: The Winter Root

“But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me.” — Psalm 13:5-6 (NIV)

THE JOURNEY

For the first three years of my faith, I was running on rocket fuel. Every time I worshipped, I got goosebumps. Every time I prayed, I felt a warm, physical peace wash over my chest. I thought that feeling was God. I thought that feeling was love.

And then, November hit my soul.

Nothing tragic happened. There was no major crisis or hidden sin. But I woke up one morning, opened my Bible, and it felt like reading a stereo manual. I prayed, and my words seemed to hit the ceiling and bounce back onto the carpet. The warmth was gone. The goosebumps vanished. The radio station had gone to static.

For six months, I lived in a spiritual winter. I panicked. I thought God had abandoned me. I tried to manufacture the feelings—I played the worship music louder, I prayed longer, I cried out. But the silence was deafening.

I sat down with an older mentor in my church, an eighty-year-old man named Thomas who had walked with God for decades.

“I think I’ve lost it, Thomas,” I confessed. “I don’t feel God’s love anymore. And if I’m honest, I don’t feel much love for Him right now, either. It’s just… dry.”

Thomas smiled gently, taking a sip of his coffee. “Congratulations,” he said.

I stared at him. “For what?”

“You’ve graduated from the honeymoon,” he replied. “When you first fall in love, God gives you all those feelings to capture your heart. It’s a gift. But feelings are shallow. If God always gave you the warm fuzzies every time you prayed, you would eventually just fall in love with the feeling, not with Him.”

He leaned forward. “Right now, He has withdrawn the feeling to ask you a question: Will you still show up for Me in the dark? Are you here for the candy, or are you here for the Father? When you choose to open your Bible when it feels like dust, when you choose to sing when your throat is dry, you are giving Him a far purer love than you ever did when you had goosebumps.”

That conversation changed everything. I stopped trying to chase the emotional high. I kept showing up to my prayer chair. It was hard work. It felt like shoveling snow. But over time, the panic faded into a quiet, unshakeable resolve.

When spring finally came and the warmth returned to my spirit, I realized something profound had happened. I wasn’t fragile anymore. My faith wasn’t dependent on a mood. By loving Him in the winter, my roots had gone deep.

Heart of the Matter

We live in a culture that defines love as an emotion. If we don’t “feel it,” we assume the love is dead. But biblical love is not an emotion; it is a covenant. It is a choice to stay.

In Psalm 13, David begins by crying out, “How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever?” He is in the middle of a brutal spiritual winter. He feels ignored. But by verse 5, he makes a radical pivot: “But I trust in your unfailing love.” He doesn’t say he feels the love; he says he trusts it.

Here is the dynamic: You love God by remaining steadfast when the lights go out. You show up. You serve. You praise Him based on His character, not your current mood. You say, “I am not a fair-weather friend.” He loves you back by building your endurance. He uses the silence to push your roots deeper into the soil of His truth. A tree that only experiences spring will blow over in the first hurricane. God loves you enough to give you a winter so that when the real storms of life hit, you are immovable.

Faith in Action

Are you in a season where prayer feels dry and reading the Word feels boring?

The Challenge: Today, practice the discipline of the “Anyway.”

• Do not wait for inspiration to strike.
• Sit down for five minutes and pray anyway.
• Read one chapter of scripture anyway.
• Say to God: “Lord, I do not feel anything right now. But I am giving You my time and my attention anyway, because You are worthy of it, regardless of my emotions.”

Prayer for the Day

Lord of the Seasons, I confess that I am addicted to the emotional highs. When I cannot feel You, I assume You have left me. Forgive me for loving the feeling of Your presence more than I love You. Today, I anchor my heart in Your covenant, not my mood. I will show up in the winter. I will praise You in the dry places. Deepen my roots, Lord, so that my love for You becomes unshakeable. Amen.

LOVE Note

“He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles… Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” > — C.S. Lewis (spoken from the perspective of the demon Screwtape about God)