What if I don’t feel God anymore?: Update for this godless time

I first explored this in 2012 and keep going back to Ewan McGregor’s parable about moving into new life. In the middle of Trump destruction, change is forced on us, so it does not feel like growth. But a client reminded me the other day, “Why waste a good crisis?”

The film, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, is parable about gaining faith. It helps us answer a question people sometimes ask surreptitiously: “What if I don’t feel God anymore?”

What if I feel like a mundane Christian destined for mediocrity?What if what excited me doesn’t anymore?What if I am trying to feel God and it is not working?Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor and you’ll see a young Kristen Scott Thomas, too.Ewan McGregor’s development parable

Ewan McGregor has similar questions in his lovely movie.

In the film, McGregor plays a surly bureaucrat from the fish and game department who is unsatisfied with his life and his wife, and is emotionally cut off from his colleagues. But things begin to transform when his life is invaded by a charismatic, visionary sheik and the sheik’s wealth-managing, sexy assistant. For one thing, Ewan’s love of salmon fishing ends up being a metaphor for his own change.

The movie is a strange story about believing the impossible. The sheik wants salmon to thrive and reproduce in the Yemeni desert. At one crucial point, they have created a lake and a fish ladder and they have stocked the lake with farm-bred salmon (because the wild fish were too precious for enthusiasts to part with). The farm-bred fish are like Ewan McGregor: staid and stuck in a holding tank. Ewan has sat in his cubicle for a long time not really doing anything. Likewise, he has sat in his depressing marriage not having children and not really making love. The question about these farm-bred salmon is: Will they swim upstream, as salmon instinctively must do to reproduce?

As with all good parables, you are already asking the question: “Will I?” What about my development?

Everyone tensely watches from the dam, afraid their huge, wild experiment will be  a bust. But right when they are ready to give up, one salmon leaps out of the water. Soon all of them are turning around and getting up the ladder and up the stream. Excitement ensues.

But then something horrible happens. Just like Ewan experienced in the middle of his new project when his wife decided to leave him, some person who thinks the sheik is a liberal threat to Yemeni culture blows up the dam! Most of the fish are left high and dry. Just a little creek is left of the water project. They are sure all is lost. Ewan does not know what to do. But as he despondently looks over the project, one lone, surviving fish leaps in the air. They are not all dead!

Many of their expectations died, but something new hung on. Their previous idea for the water project was still in pieces, but a new and better result sprang up from the ruins of their work.

Here’s the meaning of the parable for people who don’t feel very good about where their life is going. Ewan felt like a dried up scientist destined for the mundane. He tried something new and it didn’t work just right and he did not know what to do. Something unexpected took place as a result of him taking some initiative. He endured the loss of what was and entered into what is next.

If you don’t feel God and you would like to, that is probably what is happening to you.

First of all, no one can really answer the questions, “What if I don’t feel God anymore?” because you are precious you. One size does not fit all when it comes to faith.

Second of all, I have some ideas about what might be going on. Don’t give up!

1)  Your childhood faith might be wearing out. It usually needs to move from head to heart.

I use the running the bases chart to talk about how we know God. It implies that we are always developing. Developing is a good thing, even though it includes feeling the uncertainty of moving further and the loss of standing safely on a base. The “game” is ongoing.

A lot of Christians only get to first base when it comes to understanding God. They have kind of a teenager faith. Many people come to faith when they are teenagers and they never get much farther than their original understanding. If you don’t experience the presence of God, maybe God  kept moving and you stayed on first base!

Old feelings pass away, but deeper feelings are in store. Spiritual “feelings” that are deeper than the reactions we learned in childhood are being developed in our much larger and deeper new eternal family.

2) You are going through a change of season and you need some new disciplines.

Think about just sticking with the basics of a “first base” faith in Jesus: knowing the Bible. Getting the gist of the Bible is no small thing, really. It is quite a feat to achieve a basic understanding of what Jesus is talking about, much more to feel secure about the way you are going to do the word.  It takes a lot of concentration to just get started. It might be tempting to stay on the first base of faith, or the second, or wherever you are, even though that season of development is over.

In the case of reading the Bible, spiritual development can’t stay at the level of merely understanding concepts. For one thing, the Bible leads us to the basic disciplines of meditation and prayer — those are not concepts, they are experiences. From reading the Bible we gain a collection of basic approaches to laying a personal, spiritual foundation that must accompany our reading. Meditating on the Bible saturates us with the truth and love that is revealed. We’re not just reading the words, we are responding to God and forming our relationship.

If that relationship does not keep changing and growing, something is stuck. In a new season we are called to run the bases at a deeper level. Our original idea of what they meant, as good as it might have been, turns out to have something deeper behind it.

3) You are experiencing psychological development

In our relationships with God we are always working on basic trust. We develop in the Spirit a lot like children develop in their families. Rather than milk we need solid food. Eventually, we need to develop agency. Then we have to endure losses and become adults. “What doesn’t kill us helps us grow,” it is said, and that is mostly true.

If you are wondering why you don’t feel God, it could be depression or anxiety talking. These symptoms are often “friends” that alert us to deeper things happening in our souls. They may not feel like friends, but they are often the signposts leading toward change. The uncomfortable feelings we often prefer to avoid are actually important to our spiritual development. The destruction of dams we thought should never be blown up often results in something better than we ever could have predicted.

Close relationships and young marriages often go through a lot of anger and hurt as the partners push one another to develop. When children are added to a family they push people further down the road. Losing one’s job or losing a loved one calls us to become deeper, to trust God. We need to listen to our anger, listen to the sadness and other feelings behind it and find out what it developing. Let’s not merely fight, flee, freeze or fawn in a self-defeating way, or our typical way, or the old way. Jesus is a new way.

Thinking over a parable, reading this blog post, relating to what is said, trying to stay open to God (even if you think your relationship is in a holding tank that feels less than fresh), are all ways to start moving in a new direction. You have spiritual instincts that are always ready to kick in. Let them leap.

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