Blog by Alan Fadling

How do you respond when your prayer life feels dry? Do you ever wonder if you’re actually in touch with God or just saying words into the air? During seasons like that in my own life of prayer, I (Alan) have found a lot of help from a recent spiritual classic on the topic: When the Well Runs Dry by Thomas Green.

In it, Green explores what happens when prayer moves beyond our initial striving efforts and becomes more about receptivity and surrender. Have you ever felt like prayer is just you doing all the talking—or wondered where God is when the excitement fades? Where is God when our prayer feels too quiet? What assumptions might we need to revisit in moments like this? Let’s consider how prayer is less about effort and more about encounter.

On my eight-day silent retreat last summer, I took along a few of Thomas Green’s books to reread, including this one. He’s been a trustworthy guide, helping me to navigate a life of what the book’s subtitle calls “prayer beyond the beginnings.” I’ve found many books on prayer that help us get started. There are fewer books that provide guidance for some of the challenging places we may encounter on our journey of communion with God.

I’d like to share a couple of key insights from this book that helped me and that I believe will help you in your own deepening communion with God.

Prayer Is a Relationship

Green reminds us of the way many of us begin in prayer when he says, “Praying generally meant meditation, something we do, our activity of analyzing the gospel and making applications to our own life situation and resolutions as to how we would serve Christ better. It was all very good as far as it went, but it did not go far enough. Specifically, it did not allow for the possibility that prayer might become less and less what we do and more and more what God does in us.”*

When we begin, we assume that prayer is mostly something we do. We focus mostly on our activity, our words of request, our concerns expressed. We read and study the Bible. We meditate on what we see in scripture. We offer our concerns for others. We give thanks. We sing praise. And all of this is part of prayer—the human part.

It's good to remember that God is not a stoic and silent judge listening wordlessly to our testimony at the front of a courtroom. God is a loving and present Father listening closely to his daughters and sons.

Prayer is more conversation than monologue. In prayer, we learn that the Spirit is speaking to us personally through our reading and reflection on scripture. God is offering us guidance and counsel for our actual daily lives. God is leading us into truth—into reality. God is expressing his heart toward us. God is at work. Over time, we realize our praying is not mostly at our initiative but is in fact a growing receptivity and responsiveness to God’s initiative and work.

Sometimes God lets our prayer life grow dry to invite us to question some of our assumptions as beginners. Many of those assumptions have to do with our idea of the God to whom we pray. This leads to a second insight that is helpful for us to remember.

Our Image of God Is Not God

 Is that sentence intimidating? It doesn’t have to be. It’s good for us to acknowledge that our ideas of God will always be smaller and less perfect than the reality of who God is. We all have misguided ideas of God that God wants to refine.

On this theme, Green says that “the time will surely come when the well of our imagination runs dry and we must either be convinced that God is not the image we have of him or else we will take the loss of the image for the loss of God himself—and we will be tempted to abandon prayer as a hopeless endeavor.”†

Part of our life of prayer is growing to know God. In that, it helps us to acknowledge that none of us know God perfectly. Elton Trueblood, who was like the Dallas Willard of the mid-twentieth century, spoke about our need for “epistemological humility.”

Epistemology is a fancy word for the philosophy of how we know what we know, how knowing works, and what knowing is. In this regard, humility is being able to admit that we do not know everything. It’s being willing to say that we could be wrong. Too many people are proud instead of humble in their knowing. But since we are all imperfect in our knowledge of God, pride does us harm rather than good.

When it comes to prayer, we learn that the God to whom we were praying in our early years may not be as true an image of God as we thought. My own early vision of God was one that was more angry than kind, more impatient than patient, more harsh than gentle. Again, when our prayer life runs dry, we start asking questions we didn’t when prayer felt like it was going okay.

In the dryness, I may begin to question an image of God I’ve been clinging to. Losing that image isn’t losing God, but losing some of my unhelpful assumptions about God. That turns out to be good news—hard but good.

A dry season in which my doubts feel stronger than my trust is an invitation to rediscover the God who is always seeking to make himself known to us. Instead of losing God and giving up on prayer in those seasons, we are called to be receptive and responsive, open to what God wishes to say or show to us. 

When our prayer well runs dry, it may be that God is replacing our old images of who he is by inviting us to know him more truly. Prayer that once felt full and active may now feel quiet and bare—but that quiet can be holy ground. We’re not being abandoned in these moments; rather, we’re being invited to release our grip on certainty, to surrender assumptions, and to open ourselves afresh to the God who is more loving, more present, and more mysterious than we first imagined. Dryness can become a threshold—not an ending but a deepening.

For Reflection:

• What image of God might be quietly loosening its hold on you in a season of dryness? How might God be inviting you into a truer knowing of him?
• In what ways might you shift from striving in prayer to a posture of receptivity—trusting that God is already at work in the silence?

*Thomas H. Green, When the Well Runs Dry (Ave Maria Press, 1979), p. 11.

† Green, p. 20.