Far too easily as believers, we can find ourselves going through dry seasons in our relationship with the Lord. Seasons where sweet fellowship with the Lord and joyful daily communion are just not happening and the Lord seems distant. Our prayers and devotional times slip from being joyful, expectant and filled with a sense of His closeness, to becoming cold and mechanical. Now granted, it’s not that we should be driven by our emotions or feelings, but eventually one needs to admit that the *lack* of any emotion or joyful sense of His close presence in prayer and seeking His face might actually be a problem we need to address. There should always be an afterglow from being in God’s presence, and if there is not, then we should question if we were really there. The Lord does not change and has promised that if we seek Him we WILL find Him, if we seek after Him with all of our hearts, so any distance between us and the Lord, either real or perceived, always stems from an issue on our part, not His.

The first and most obvious problem would be any ongoing, repetitive sin issue in our lives. It says in Is 59:2 – But your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear. We can be grateful that Jesus has redeemed us from our sins by His blood and resolved that separation, but that sacrifice was not meant as a covering for ongoing, habitual sin in the life of the believer (Heb 10:26). We need to put the deeds of the flesh to death, forsake them and walk in the Spirit (Rom 8:13-14). We are told to “grieve not the Holy Spirit of God” (Eph 4:30) by our deeds and actions because that will quickly put a distance between us and Him and we need a regular filling of the Spirit to live the Christian life. It is imperative that we walk uprightly and follow after righteousness in order to remain close to Him.

The next most common problem is a lack of earnestness in our prayer lives. We simply don’t put in the time and effort necessary to connect with the Lord. Jesus talked about this on a number of occasions with His disciples. When Peter, James and John kept falling asleep in prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus said “could you not tarry with me for one hour?” He also spoke of it often in parables. In the parable of “the friend at night” Jesus tells us to be persistent in prayer and says “I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet *because of his persistence* he will get up and give him as much as he needs. “And I say to you,ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you. “For everyone who asks, receives; and he who seeks, finds; and to him who knocks, it shall be opened (Luke 11:8-10). In the parable of the unrighteous judge Jesus prefaced it by saying “And he spake a parable unto them *to this end*, that men ought ALWAYS to pray, and not to faint” (Luke 18:1). A lot of the conflict and problems that we have in life, or at least our inability to bear them joyfully and put our hope and trust in the Lord stem from the lack of an earnest and consistent prayer life. In the famous hymn, What a friend we have in Jesus, we hear these poignant words: “Oh, what peace we often forfeit. Oh, what needless pain we bear all because we do not carry everything to God in prayer”.

But even with all of that, aren’t dry seasons inevitable? Shouldn’t we expect to go through them regularly as part of our life in Christ and just learn to embrace them?  Interestingly, this very thing is talked about right at the beginning of Psalms when it says this about the blessed man who follows after the Lord: “And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper” (Ps 1:3). A tree that is planted by a river does not go through dry seasons, but receives constant nourishment from its flow. Yes, there may be a dry season all around that tree, but the tree itself is tapped into an endless flow and as a result continues to yield its fruit. The only thing seasonal is the specific periods of abundant fruit, but the nourishment needs to remain constant if the tree is to be healthy and it’s leaves to not wither. Jesus is that endless flow, and we need simply to regularly and consistently tap into that through our daily commitment and devotion to Him to avoid those dry seasons.