When God Feels Like a Stranger You Used to Know

"My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Far from my deliverance are the words of my groaning." - Psalm 22:1 (NASB)

There's a specific kind of grief that comes with losing someone who's still alive. I felt it when my childhood friend became someone I no longer recognized. I felt it again when the God I thought I knew became a stranger.

It happened gradually, like a friendship slowly cooling. The intimate conversations became stilted. The sense of presence faded to absence. The personality I thought I understood revealed facets that confused and disturbed me. Where once there had been warmth and familiarity, now there was distance and silence.

Maybe you recognize this spiritual estrangement. The God you once talked to easily now feels unreachable. The faith that once felt like home now feels like visiting someone else's house—you know where the bathroom is, but nothing feels quite right. You still know the language, but you've forgotten how to speak it fluently.

This isn't apostasy—it's honesty. This isn't failure—it's maturation. Sometimes our understanding of God has to die before it can be resurrected into something more real.

C.S. Lewis wrote, "We must lay before Him what is in us; not what ought to be in us." The psalmist models this brutal honesty: "Why have You forsaken me?" Not polite confusion or gentle disappointment, but raw accusation hurled into the silence.

What if this feeling of God becoming a stranger isn't abandonment but invitation? What if the God you're losing was too small, too confined by your previous understanding? What if this spiritual estrangement is making room for an encounter with divine mystery that's larger than your assumptions?

I spent two years feeling like I was mourning a lost friendship. I attended the funeral of my old faith, grieved the God I thought I knew, wondered if anything would grow in the burned-over district of my spiritual life. Then, slowly, tentatively, I began to meet Someone new. Not the stranger I feared, but the God who had always been there, finally free from the limitations of my expectations.

If God feels like a stranger right now, sit with that feeling. Don't rush to reconcile or pretend the distance isn't real. Sometimes estrangement is the prelude to intimacy. Sometimes we have to lose the God we thought we knew to find the God who actually is.