What to do when your faith starts wavering?

What does one do when one's faith starts wavering? The same thing one does when something that is supposed to be stable starts to waver - shore it up.

Someone else asked a similar question recently - what do you do when you have drifted away from God? Drift right back.

First, what do "waver" and "drift" mean? Does it mean that you no longer feel as tight with God as you once did? Does He feel very distant?

Feelings are not very reliable you know. They can be affected by barometric pressure, the amount of sleep you got, the time of the month, your digestive system, fatigue, stress, any number of things. Often, how you feel and the objective reality do not match at all.

Once, when I hadn't thought about God at all the entire day, I said to Him, "I'm so sorry, Lord. I've been so far from You all day," and He replied, "I don't know about you but I've been by your elbow all day long." In other words, feeling distant from God doesn't mean He IS distant.

There's a saying, "If God seems distant, who moved?" If it was you, then all you have to do is move closer back. He never moves away from us. If saints fervently sought union with God, then believe me, He even more fervently seeks union with us.

But here's another thing: sometimes, God steps into the shadows so that you can plumb the depth of your faith. A young friend responded to that by saying that God doesn't do that; He isn't that capricious. It isn't caprice. To believe in God when He is obviously there isn't faith. It is logic. I think it was Richard Rohr who said: "Faith is not the absence of doubt. It is commitment in the face of uncertainty."

It consoles me greatly that many of the great saints and mystics experienced this "distance" of God. St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila called it the "dark night of the soul." You may have read recently that Mother Teresa no longer felt God's consolations towards the end of her life but she never stopped loving or serving Him. One saint, (it may have been St. Therese) had such doubts that she wrote down the beliefs she doubted in her own blood. I guess what I am saying is we do not lose our faith without our permission.

When I was much younger I told a priest-friend of mine that I had so many doubts, losing my faith would have been as easy as rolling off a log. He said, "That is why your faith is so strong - you have fought for it." Feed your faith, starve your doubts.

A young soldier once prayed, "Lord, when I no longer have the strength to cling to You, just You cling to me." And He will because He does not ever want to lose us.

So there you are:

Feelings and reality do not often match. God may feel distant but He is always right there beside you.

Faith is precisely believing in the sun when it isn't shining; in the Son when He seems absent.

Faith is lost only when we allow it to be lost.

Our faith is as strong as our desire to keep it.

We feed our faith with prayer, the Eucharist, hanging out with faith-filled people, more prayer, the tenacity to hang on to God, still more prayer, looking to the saints' struggles to stay faithful, harassing the Holy Spirit for grace.

Basically, we will fight for Whom we love!