How to Navigate Spiritual Slump

With Dr. Alicia Britt Chole.

Today we are excited to have back Dr. Alicia Britt Chole, and if you know anything about her, if you heard our first interview, or if you've read her books, you know she is a sage. She is wise and she is bringing that wisdom to so many people that I know in real life that call her mentor and friend. Below is our edited conversation.

Jennie- You released a new book not too long ago, and I mean, it's a word that has a lot of feelings associated with it. So, disillusionment - talk a little bit about this topic and where this came from. The book is actually called The Night is Normal. If somebody could have told me that! The first dark night of my soul, which I will say- That is something we learn over time, but it always, especially when you're young, it hits you so hard because you think life is supposed to go well for those that love God, right?

Alicia- Absolutely. When we look back at the very, very, very beginning in the creation story, we see that night was one of the original residents of Eden. Before sin, before the fall, before the curse, night was there; which means that the night is normal, which means that from the very, very beginning, walking with God has required both day faith and night faith. I was fascinated with the concept of spiritual pain, and I think night is a metaphor for that.

Night is an image of those times in life where we spiritually ache, we spiritually hurt, and things are not spiritually the way that we thought they should be.

Jennie- Have you walked through this season? You are such a woman of faith. Talk about what that looked like for you?

Alicia- Many times! There's been so many different types of nights for me. One of my very first ones came about three or four years after Jesus interrupted my atheistic existence. Having been a sincere, adamant atheist, when Jesus revealed himself to me, everything became alive; everything went full color. For those first few years, God's presence was so tangible. Every time I opened the Word of God, it was like I heard his voice. The healing - I could touch it, I could feel it. The growth was measurable and visible to others. I was in the middle of day faith. I was living out my belief in God in full sun, which is what we prefer. We prefer to know clearly. We prefer to see clearly. We prefer to feel clearly. And then it was my senior year, so we're talking my fourth year of walking with Jesus, that all of a sudden the bottom seemed to fall out.

And what I felt I didn't feel anymore. What I was certain of, I was no longer certain of. For me, that very first night initiated by me trying to wrap my mind around subjects that were really beyond me. I had gone beyond those safe boundaries and was trying to understand things that I wasn't ready to. I felt like my faith had failed, that I was failing God; and It was a real moment of desperation where I thought I was about to lose what had saved me.

Jennie- I remember reading Saint John of the Cross when I was in my early 20s in a similar season, and what he said was that the dark night of the soul is that it is meant to mature us. When we stop hearing God's voice and feel like he's far away, there is a maturity that is happening in us. That comforted me at the time; but even to this day, because of course now the dark nights have gotten darker because problems don't shrink in life - the older you get, the more people you love and the more people that can be going through difficulty around you, and therefore you’re going through difficulty, it doesn't feel like the nights have gotten any lighter. Yet, I do feel more steady through them; so I assume the process has worked. But the fact that that's how the process goes makes me a little bit jaded. Does it all feel like some test, or does it all feel like he's just leading us along into suffering so that we grow up?

Alicia- What you just expressed is honesty.

Honesty is a friend of nearness with God.

This is the place that the nights bring us to. We are finite beings in relationship with an infinite being. All of us together on our best days, we can't even comprehend a percentage of all that God is. That gap between our finiteness and his infiniteness is called sacred mystery. It's to be expected. Previous generations, previous centuries were more expectant of these types of nights.

When our faith is growing, it's expanding beyond what we thought we knew and starting to encompass something that was previously beyond us.

These kinds of nights are a part of, they're a proven pathway of the maturation of faith. When we're in the daytime, when our faith is in full sun and it's glittering and it's fantastic, the thing about being able to see clearly and feel clearly and know clearly is that we have a tendency to start self-leading. We tag with God and say, "Fantastic, thanks so much. I've got it." But in the night, we lose that kind of illusion, because we can't see clearly, we don't know fully and we don't feel the same way. And so we have to decide who is it that we trust. Was it our understanding or is it his character? That's where love grows. Love grows as trust grows, and trust grows in the night.

Jennie- Let’s talk about that disillusionment. I don't like that word because I do feel like I have experienced it. Of course, we all have. I hope and think all of us have. I think it's a part of growing and trusting God more. But it also can feel like when we're watching other people that the dark got too dark and they walked away.

Alicia- Yes, the dark can get too dark. That's called despair. In disillusionment, what's actually happening, the word, if we were to break it down, it's the process of negating or leaving false ideas and ideals, the dissing of illusions. There's an illustration that I use in the book, and I'm sitting here drawing a circle like everybody can see me who's hearing. But if we think about relationships, relationship with God, relationship with our own faith, relationship with other people of faith, they all seem to begin with a substance that I'll call joyful anticipation. It's the start. It's bright, it's often beautiful. It's filled with an expectation that this experience of good is a deposit on the belief that it will always feel this way. We have this joyful anticipation that begins things. Then the next phase is disillusionment, where we start losing some of the illusions that I'll always feel this great, and we have to make a choice.

The problem is that we're in a culture that mistakenly calls joyful anticipation love, prematurely calls it love, and we mistakenly call disillusionment failure. We think- If God loves me, then he will do this, not do this, allow this, never allow this, speak now, never be silent.

Then our faith matures and we realize that God is far more complex, that his ways are beyond us, that if he led Jesus into the desert, he's going to lead us there too.

But if we view the disillusionment as failure, we're very vulnerable to bailing. This is one of the greatest snares that the enemy has set for us. We have blurred the lines between emotion and devotion. We have mistaken adrenaline for anointing, and we have set up a generation to have a very difficult time distinguishing between what is good and what feels good. When they're lost in the night and they don't have a spiritual framework, they aren't saying-

"Okay, wow, everybody's been here. Everybody who's ever had anything to say has been here, Job's been here, Elijah's been here, Moses has been here. John the Baptist has been there, Jesus has been here. This is normal. This mean my faith is growing. My faith is advancing. My faith isn't retreating." 

If we don't have a biblical historical framework for seeing the night as normal, we view the night as failure, and it's very, very easy to bail.

Jennie- I think what often keeps me close to God in the night is the permission I feel to be very forthright and angry and frustrated and beg him for things and question things he's doing. I think that type of relationship is everywhere in the bible, but I don't know that everyone sees God that way, or that they could say those things.

Alicia- Look at Elijah, there was a ton of spiritual warfare there and exhaustion. We look at John the Baptist. Part of his night was his commitment to justice and speaking the truth and where it landed him. In Jesus, his obedience. I think that part of what helps me when my heart is just breaking watching somebody else walk through the night is the recognition that I don't know all the ingredients and neither do they. Only God does.

The way to walk through the night remains the same, whether I think I understand it or not. And that's that commitment to follow. And we can rage while we're following. We can weep while we're following. We can rejoice while we're following. We can be a puddle of tears while we're following. The follow is what Jesus called us to from the very beginning, and follow is relational.

We can see the following as an invitation.

We're sitting in the dark. We can't see, we don't feel what we used to feel, and we're wondering if we failed or if there was some kind of turn we were supposed to make that we missed. And in the very beginning when Jesus issued the calls to the disciples, it was all about relationship.

If I could reframe “follow”, it would be, be with me, because I'm absolutely committed to being with you. Just be with me. You don't have to perform.

There isn't some kind of scorecard that you're aiming for. There isn't a checkbox that I'm trying to evaluate you with. I simply want you. It's a commitment from God of his presence, no matter how dark it is.

He's profoundly with us. Can we sit with God in the darkness and yell and weep? That is really all that's being asked.

Jennie- I believe that that is happening for so many people right now, that even if you don't feel him, even if you think he is so far away, he's there. He's holding you. And he may not be fixing your problem today, but he promises that he will work all of these things together for good, for those that love him. There will be a time when these nights will be made right. That we will live in the sun.

Alicia- That's right. They won't last forever. But I keep remembering what he said to Thomas, "Blessed are those who believe but haven't seen." There is a work that we are doing in our nights. There is a placeholder that Job had of, "This is awful. This makes no sense to me whatsoever. I'm not even sure I like you, but I believe in you."

"Where am I going to go but to you?" And so there is a work, and I think that's part of the problem in the night, is that we feel so powerless and we feel so incredibly unproductive. But there is a spiritual work being done.

Jennie- What would you say when you think of people walking around, even through dark nights with heavy burdens, what would you say to them that feel like they're carrying another gospel, that they have to measure up and they have to even suffer well and rightly?

Alicia- One of my favorite statements is that God never wanted to use us. He always wanted to love us. And I think that in our Western church we have measured maturity in terms of service, not in terms of love. And by love I don't mean just loving God, I mean knowing that we're loved by God, living loved, living loved. Because when we live loved, we live differently. When we live already loved, we lead differently. And so with a heavy burden on us of maybe pain or grief or conflict or misunderstanding or being misrepresented, of being betrayed, of being abandoned, whatever it might be, my encouragement is always:

Let us sit. Let us be silent. Let us consider the love of God.

Because his love for us is great. There's nothing we can do to add to it. There's nothing we can do to subtract from it. And his love isn't awaiting some kind of better moment where we feel great, or some kind of pitch in a worship service or the perfect book that we stumbled upon. I find, and it's counterintuitive, but I find that I understand my belovedness more when I sit in silence with my pain. I'm not trying to outrun it, outgun it, stuff it, fluff it. I hurt. God, this just hurts. And it's that honesty that gives way.

If I could tell a story, when I was little, my dad used to always sit me down. My dad was a closet atheist. I had no idea he was an atheist until after Jesus interrupted my life. But dad would sit me down, and since I was tiny, and he would say, "What kind of questions do you have? What's the daughter thinking?" And from the age of two until my dad died I would just pour out all of these questions, my angst, my frustration, what I was worried about, what I was wondering about. Daddy and I would talk and talk and talk as I asked my questions into the wee hours of the morning, into adulthood.

When I look back, I don't remember one single answer we came to. I don't remember one problem that I had, "Oh, okay, well, that's behind me." But I remember the safety of honesty.

I remember the safety of asking, and how that safety grew our relationship.

It grew our trust. Sometimes I've seen children ask some fantastic questions and they receive sort of a, "Shh, you don't say that about God. You don't ask that about God," as though he's touchy or easily offended. No.

Bring your questions with you. They will enhance, not detract from your love for God.