A Devotional for Spiritual Dryness (for the Christian Man Who Won’t Talk About It)
⏱ 9 min read
Brother,
I am writing this to you because there is a particular kind of dryness that the Christian man does not, in the ordinary course of things, talk about — not to his wife, not to his small group, not to the men he has been sitting beside in the pew for fifteen years. He carries it on his own. He keeps reading the Bible because he is the kind of man who keeps doing what he said he would do. The reading lands on nothing. He keeps showing up to church because the family is going. The songs pass over him like songs sung in a language he used to know. He prays the table grace and the bedtime prayer with the children. The prayers come out of his mouth and disappear into the ceiling.
He does not say any of this out loud. The men around him are talking about the sermon, or the building project, or the score. He is doing what he has always done — being steady, being present, being the man the household can rely on — and underneath the steadiness, the inside of him has gone quiet in a way he does not have words for.
This is a devotional for spiritual dryness, and it is written for him.
If that man is you, this letter is the first place in a long time someone has named what you have been carrying.
What I want to say first
There is nothing wrong with you.
A man can love God for thirty years and walk into a season where the felt sense of God thins out. The long Christian tradition has known this for two thousand years. The Reformed pastors called it the hiding of God’s face. The mystics called it the dark night. The Puritan writers called it desertion — meaning not that God had left, but that the sense of His presence had withdrawn for a season, on purpose, for the deepening of the soul.
None of those traditions treated dryness as a failure of the man. All of them treated it as a real and recognised season in the life of faith. The men who wrote about it were pastors, theologians, and saints — not weak Christians, not lapsed Christians, but men whose love for God was deep enough that the felt thinning of His presence registered as a season worth naming.
You are not the first man to walk this. You are not the broken version. You are in a long company of men who have walked through dry years and come out the other side with a deeper, quieter trust than the easy years could ever have produced.
Why you haven’t said anything
You haven’t said anything because there is no good place to say it.
If you tell your wife, you worry it will scare her — she relies on the steadiness of your faith, and naming the dryness might feel to her like the floor is shifting. If you tell the men in your small group, you suspect the responses you’ll get: have you been in the Word, brother? and are you spending enough time in prayer? — questions that are well-meant but that land like a verdict, because you have been in the Word and the dryness is still here, which means the questions, as posed, have no useful answer.
If you tell the pastor, you imagine he’ll quote a verse you already know, pray for you in the office, and then check in with you next month — and you’ll have to give him a status update on a thing you cannot make change on a schedule. So you don’t.
You carry it alone. The carrying is heavy. The not-saying is part of why it has become heavier than it needs to be.
This letter is to say: you can name it here, on a page nobody else is going to see, and you can begin a small practice that does not require any of the conversations you have not been able to have.
What the practice is
Three pieces. Small enough that you can do them tomorrow morning before anyone else in the house is up. Small enough that they do not require you to feel anything for them to count.
The first: read one paragraph of scripture. Slowly. Out loud if the house is quiet enough. Not a chapter — a paragraph. Psalm 27. Psalm 42. Lamentations 3. John 14. Pick one. Read the same one for a week if it helps. The reading is not for performance. The reading is for the slow act of being in the room with what God said.
The second: write three honest sentences. Not three sentences of prayer. Three sentences of what is actually true today. Today is dry again. Here is what I noticed at work. I am still here. That is a complete entry. It is a complete prayer.
The third: a short sentence handing the day over. Father, the day is Yours. Hold what I cannot. Then close the journal and go to work.
That is the practice. Ten minutes, fifteen at most. Same shape every morning. No felt sense required.
Pause. Notice where the weight sits in the shoulders. Don’t move it. Just let the shoulders come down half an inch — the way they used to before you started bracing.
A man carrying a dry season usually carries it in the shoulders and the jaw. The body has been quietly holding what the mind has been unable to name. Some of what the practice does is happen in the body, slowly, while the mind is still circling.
You are not behind on the prayer if the shoulders are heavy. The Christ who came into a body knows what a man in a dry season looks like from the inside. The Christ who slept in the boat in the storm knows what tired faith looks like, too.
What Bonar said about this season
Horatius Bonar was a Scottish pastor in the mid-1800s who wrote some of the steadiest pastoral theology in the English language. He had a particular gift for naming what the soul actually does in a dry season — and what it does not have to do — without ever making the man on the receiving end feel weaker for being there.
“If not, he will have much to reprove, but still I pray him to come unto me, for nothing can so certainly bring my heart into a right condition as the presence of the Sun of Righteousness, who brings healing in his wings. Come, therefore, O Lord, my God, my soul invites thee earnestly, and waits for thee eagerly. Come to me, O Jesus, my well-beloved, and plant fresh flowers in my garden, such as I see blooming in such perfection in thy matchless character! Come, O my Father, who art the Husbandman, and deal with me in thy tenderness and prudence!”
— Horatius Bonar, on prayer in a dry season
Read that twice. Notice what it is not doing. It is not telling you to do more. It is not asking you to feel something first. It is the simple, repeated act of inviting the Lord into the garden the man already knows is dry, and asking the Husbandman — the one who actually does the growing — to deal with it in His own tenderness and prudence.
The man’s job is to invite. God’s job is to grow.
This is what the dry-season practice is, simplified: you keep extending the invitation. He does the growing on a timetable you do not control and cannot speed up.
The two things that will make the practice fail
The first is measuring it by feeling. If the entry of today is dry again is judged by you as a worse entry than the entry of today I felt something, you will quit the practice within six weeks. The dry season unhooks the practice from the feeling on purpose. Stop measuring. Just keep the practice.
The second is performing it. There is no audience. Your wife is not going to read the journal. The small group leader is not going to ask for an entry count. The page is between you and God. The performance instinct — the one that has carried you well in most areas of life — is the wrong tool for this room. Close it. Sit in the chair. The chair is for God.
What changes — and on what timetable
You will not feel anything change for some time. That is normal. Most men who keep the small practice through a dry year report the shift as gradual and almost invisible — something steadied. I noticed in May that I had stopped flinching at the word “God” in conversation. I noticed in August that the verse for the morning was holding longer than the morning.
What is happening, underneath, is not nothing. The soul is being slowly rewoven around a kind of faith that does not require the felt sense to function. That is the gift of the dry season, though it does not announce itself as a gift while it is happening. It announces itself as nothing. The gift becomes visible later — sometimes years later — when the man finds he can pray on a flat day without spiralling, can read scripture without measuring, can sit in a pew during a song he doesn’t connect to and not feel any need to perform.
That settled trust is what the dryness is making in you. You will not see it. You only have to keep showing up.
What I would tell you if we were sitting across from each other
Three things.
First: nothing is wrong with you. The dry season is a season, not a verdict. The men who wrote the spiritual canon walked through it. You are walking what they walked.
Second: do the small practice tomorrow morning. Not the large practice. The small one. The paragraph, the three honest sentences, the closing line. Ten minutes. Then get on with the day.
Third: if you have not been to a prayer for strength at work page in some time — or written down what you would write if no one was reading — both are short, quiet companions to this letter, written for the man who has been carrying things in silence. The longer practice for the silence itself is the slow walk through what this letter only sketches.
You are not alone in this. The long company of Christian men who have walked dry years is wider than you know. The God who held them is holding you. The practice that carried them is available to you tomorrow morning. The bar is low because the season requires it to be, and the lowering is not failure. It is wisdom.
With brotherly respect,
the editors at Everspring
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A devotional that walks the dry season honestly, 140 days
The dry-season practice lasts when it is held inside a journal whose shape does not move when the feeling does. Same structure every morning. The verse already chosen so the decision does not eat the slot. Older devotional language gently glossed in plain English so the page actually lands at the end of a man’s tired week.
That’s the Everspring Prayer Study Guide for Women. The title says “for Women” because that is the primary reader, but the dry-season practice in it is the same one a man can keep — same chair, same paragraph, same three honest sentences — for the long year of staying when the staying is the faith.
The Everspring Prayer Study Guide for Women walks 140 days of the small, steady dry-season practice — with scripture chosen for the days the usual verses feel theoretical, prompts that do not require the felt sense, and a shape that holds for the man or woman keeping the practice when the feeling has gone.
