It’s been one month and twelve days since my dad was released from the hospital, and it’s also the day Russia has invaded Ukraine. Nothing links these two events except this confession: in moments of crisis, I feel many things, but not prayers.
I repeat: I don’t “feel” prayers.
What I mean is that I’ve never had a feeling wash over me or interrupt my day with the knowledge that people are praying. I’ve never had a “warm fuzzy” like that. I’ve asked God many times to have me “feel” prayers, but those asks have gone unanswered.
But that has not detracted from my faith. If anything, that lack of feeling has caused me to realize the unfair burden we put on God—and on ourselves—to search for a feeling before acknowledging the truth about what’s going on.
Feelings alert us to what’s going on in and around us. The brain-body connection is powerful, providing a direct link from what we think to how we feel. But extended physical or psychological distress can break that link, and trauma can sever the connection, causing us to over- or under-react to what’s going on. If we’ve spent a lot of time coping with situations outside our control, our immediate feelings don’t always match our immediate surroundings. Read: if someone encourages you when you’re suffering, it may bounce. If someone prays for you as you go through a hard time, you may “feel” nothing.
I was in survival mode when my dad was merely surviving, and that’s largely why I didn’t “feel” your prayers. But I knew THAT I KNEW they were effective. I wiped tears and swiped my screen while authentically “heart”ing comment after comment because I knew that what I felt didn’t change reality: you continued lifting my dad up in prayer. And your prayers were the difference between his life and death.
In the middle of not “feeling” prayers, I watched my dad sit up in his hospital bed and stand to his feet. I watched him reach less and less frequently for the cup into which he coughed up blood from his lungs. I’m now watching medicines keep his atrial fibrillation under control to the point where he can get on a treadmill and walk. I didn’t need to feel your prayers to see them in action. I now feel differently than I did a month and twelve days ago, but that doesn’t change the efficacy of your prayers.
This is why you must give yourself grace: you’re not a machine in which every reaction fits the reality of the situation. And this is why you must not charge God with your lack of feelings. Don’t succumb to an over-simplification of reality like that.
Maybe you carry the burden of “What’s wrong with me?” because you’re not feeling God in the ways you think you should. I hope you’ll stop putting undue pressure on yourself and know that God is constant when we’re not. He remains faithful because He cannot disown himself (2 Timothy 2:13). Maybe you’re not a “feeler” (spoiler alert: that’s not a prerequisite for Christianity). But I hope you know that people have prayed for you and are doing so right now (yes, I’m praying for people who read this post), and I hope you look back on your life and see His graces whether you felt them at the time or not.
I find solace in the fact that the appearance and disappearance of feelings is just plain part of what it means to be human. Within Scripture’s first chapter, we read that God created change: Seasons. Tides. Sunrises. Ebb and flow is built into earth and ocean, and it’s woven into the fabric of humanity as well. God called these good. He knows how we are formed; He remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14, NIV). We understand the Person of Christ as a holy tension of full divinity and full humanity; why would we emphasize one over the other in ourselves? We need people of God who do not over-emphasize spirit and under-emphasize body. We need to demonstrate what prayer looks like even when we don’t feel it. As with any good discipline, we don’t have to feel right before doing right.
I think our Christian circles need more people who are willing to admit that they don’t feel prayers AND that this lack of feeling doesn’t stop them from praying. We need more people who say, “I didn’t feel anything” AND in the same breath say, “I didn’t lose heart. I prayed anyway.”
Now onto praying about today’s invasion of Ukraine: it’s the same concept. You may feel nothing in relation to it because your reality seems so far removed from the conflict. Or you may feel many emotions, as do I, after having lived in Eastern Europe, forged friendships there, and learned enough about its power struggles and spiritual challenges to be terrified and infuriated and demoralized all at once. But if my dad’s near-death-experience has taught me anything, it’s that feelings don’t undermine the constancy or activity of God. You don’t have to wait for God to “move on your heart” or give you a feeling to know that He’s working in and around you. Wherever you fall along the spectrum of feelings, your current state is the perfect one to reach out to the unchanging, ever-loving God.
God had worked twelve miracles through prophet Elisha before the morning when an Aramean army with chariots and horses surrounded the city of Dothan to capture him. And his servant lost it. Elisha responded compassionately. “Elisha prayed, ‘Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.’ Then the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha” (2 Kings 6:17). The servant’s feelings were valid, but God was doing far more than he could physically see. At the same time, God can be working powerfully, but we just can’t see it or feel it. That doesn’t stop God. And it shouldn’t stop us from believing in His activity. He could have an army of deliverance in front of us, and we might never feel it.
Maybe the people of Ukraine will feel your prayers tonight. Maybe they won’t. But their situations will be affected by your prayers regardless. God is doing more than any of us can see. Maybe years from now, Ukrainians will look back and see evidence of divine deliverance on February 24 and conclude that people were praying for them. And maybe at this very moment, there are Ukrainians praying for you. 
Believing in the power of prayer no matter what I feel,
Renée
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Photo: hands of my dad, my mom, and me.