a desert (no, not dessert) place

Feel like I'm in a desert place (wish I was saying a dessert place, so much more fun.)  I don't know why, but I feel like God is really far away from me.  Anyone else ever felt that?  I guess the key word in the statement I just made is that it "feels" like God is far away.  The older I get, the more I realize feelings aren't facts.  We can count on our feelings as much as we can count on the weather.  Just as the weather changes constantly, so too do feelings. 

But what do I do when I'm in this desert feeling place?  How do I get through it?  Admittedly this is not the first time I have ever felt this way.  There have been many times when God seemed to be, well . . .  off in a galaxy far, far away.  So I think back to what I've done in the past.  Sometimes I've pouted, sometimes I've shrugged my shoulders as if to say, "Well, who needs you anyway?"  Sometimes I've hung on by my fingernails waiting for something, anything to change.  And it usually does.  Usually I come back to a place where I feel (there's that word again) closer to God, more like he's in the same room with me, right there beside me. 

What does a person do when they're in that desert place?  I think these times have been the ones that have tried my soul more than anything.  After all who doesn't feel pretty good about God when everything is peachy keen.  We feel blessed, happy, full of life.  But when the hard times come, what keeps us from being knocked over?  I believe it's faith.  Faith that's "being sure of what it hopes for and certain of what it doesn't see."  (Hebrews 11:1)  After all, this is "what the ancients were commended for."  Noah, Abraham,  Moses, David;  all believed in a God they couldn't see, in promises that hadn't been fulfilled, confident that God was able to do what he said he would. 

And so it is that we live by faith; the kind that can be shaken but never blown apart by the winds of change.  It's the kind of faith that stands up to anything, takes the blows, and keeps fighting.  Beause it knows that, eventually, feelings will change, but faith stands firm forever.