The loneliest times are when that place inside of me where God’s presence usually sits seems vacant. That silence echoes. Some silences can be comforting, when, for instance, a blaring radio is suddenly turned off, or the traffic at the end of the day has stilled and you can no longer hear it out your bedroom window. That silence can wrap around you like a blanket, soothing and secure.

But silence from God takes your breath of life away-especially if you’ve known his whispers thousands of times before. Singer Kenneth Cope wrote these words for one of his songs:

So breathe in me,

I need You now,

I’ve never felt so dead within.

It is a plea most of us have experienced. We know times when we wonder, “Where is the song that God usually sings to me? Where is the answer that is too big for words, the current in my soul that cascades like light inside of me?”

This aching vacancy seems worse when our need is great, when we can’t find the comfort our whole soul yearns for. Then that divine homesickness seems particularly acute. Our souls seem to know that once there was a time when we basked continually in his presence and the current situation may feel bleak indeed without Him. “Answer me, O Lord. Talk to me.”

We know, of course, that sometimes our sense of distance from the Light is our own doing. We have stepped away from Him, and if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that it is we who have moved. We may not have even chosen to move, but drifted away unconsciously like a leaf in the wind, distracted by breezes. We believe ourselves too busy to do things that point us in God’s direction when the here and now presses us with such urgencies. Even if we are busy doing good things, we may have forgotten to incline our whole soul toward Him.

Then again, sometimes we have moved because we have a streak of rebellion, fearing that submission to him means giving up too much of ourselves.

But this is not what I speak of today. Instead, I muse about those times when we feel like we have given our all and made every effort to be close to God, and we still feel forgotten. Those are the most difficult times. How can we respond to life’s trials when he doesn’t answer—or at least we don’t hear his answer?

Joseph Smith knew a time like that. The Latter-day Saints who had gathered in Independence, Missouri, in 1831 had come with a burning intent to build Zion, a city to their God. They gathered in groups in groves to speak of the gospel and also the cruel persecutions endured by the disciples of Jesus in former ages, little dreaming that the time was at hand when they, too, would be required to endure like trials “for truth’s sake.”

If irony is the bitter crust on the bread of adversity, the bitterness was made worse because the sweet Zion they hoped to build turned to nightmare of persecution within two years.

In 1833 a mob, made up of some of the most prominent men of the area, drew up a constitution and demanded that the Saints leave. They swore, “We will rid Jackson County of the ‘Mormons; peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must. If they will not go without, we will whip and kill the men; we will destroy their children, and ravish their women!

This demand quickly turned to demolishing the Saint’s printing press, burning their homes, beating Mormons and finally turning them of their homes. They left trails of blood across the snow, in that November of 1833.

Terryl and Fiona Givens write, “As prophet and leader of his people, responsible for the deaths and suffering now unfolding, Joseph certainly felt he had a right as never before to a revelation clarifying the situation and giving him inspired direction. But the heavens were silent. Such answers, he lamented, ‘I cannot learn from any communication by the spirit to me.’ Of the reasons for their continuing plight he added, ‘I am ignorant and the Lord will not show me.’ His prayers went up ‘to God day and night,’ as silence met his anguished appeals.”

This silence from God did not signify his absence. What we can see is that even the best of people have times when they cannot see an answer to their prayers—or at least not an answer that they are equipped to read.

The question remains for us to determine what to make of those times when our words and pleas echo back at us, seemingly without response.

Of one thing we can be certain. If our devotion to God and our dedication to discipleship is dependent on our always feeling and sensing his light, our faith may be challenged in this life. There are days that are tedious and days that drain us of life force. There are times of aching disappointment and loss that we are quite certain God could have spared us. There are times we plead for direction and we feel left on our own to decide.

We cannot be tempted to waste our lives and determine our devotion to God by constantly taking our spiritual temperature. Yesterday I was happy with the Lord because I felt his blessings. Today I feel neglected and forgotten because life is tough. Yesterday I swelled with spiritual radiance because I felt the Spirit. Today, I question my faith and foundation because the heavens seem silent and I am desperate for help.

This is a spiritual roller coaster—and like the amusement park variety—can make us sick. If we are continually questioning the foundation of our faith based on how we feel today, we are on dangerous ground. Today brings us every kind of challenge, often coming like stones pelting us from every side. We may not feel God in the onslaught.

Today may bring challenges to our faith and we forget the truths that we have always known that have comforted us when we’ve needed it.

If our belief is contingent on how we feel spiritually from day to day, it is guaranteed that we will be unstable as water. God will test our mettle. He will feel after us—and unfortunately those may be at the very times when we can’t feel him.

If our faith is based mainly on how we feel or how we think he is blessing us at any given time, we will find it a shaky foundation that may crumble beneath us.

To be in time, as we are in mortality, means to change. Our passions and imaginations are in continual flux. We rise to a spiritual level and then fall back. We experience life as a series of troughs and peaks. We undulate. Convictions that are no more solid than our mood or circumstance of the hour will always be wavering. Convictions and choices cannot be a hostage to how we feel at the moment.

Those who are writers have learned that if they only write when they feel like it, they will never write. Those spurts of inspiration are few and writing is difficult. Authors do not pen their novels by waiting to work until they feel like it. They set a clock every day, start to work and begin clicking on the keyboard. Inspiration usually follows work rather than leads it.

Those who are parents know that if they only nurtured their children when they really felt like it, the world would be riddled with more neglected children. Many times we don’t feel like doing the very things that are most important.

This is true of developing our spirits and our relationship to God. We have to forge forward in our devotion, obedience and discipleship even in those times when we don’t feel like it or when doubt hangs upon us because we cannot see his answers now or when we are just too worn out because “the world is too much with us.”

The Lord repeats three beautiful words in the Book of Mormon. He asks us to be “firm, steadfast and immovable.” Note he does not say “squirm, unsteady and movable” which is the temptation of the natural man.

We are tempted to squirm—instead of be firm–when we constantly re-evaluate our faith in God, when we let old truths that have founded us be knocked by current conditions. Constantly taking your spiritual temperature does not lead to strength.

Our daughter Mariah wrote on Meridian about Maasai thinking. The Maasai are a beautiful African tribe, but the myth about them goes like this:

“They say that a Maasai warrior will die if he is locked up in prison. Close him in a dark room, keep him away from the sunshine and his cattle and he will be unable to imagine an end to this current state. Maasai cannot cling to a sweeter past or the potential for a better future. They live only for the present. Take away his present, and you take away his life.

“Last winter, I was sick with one of those terrible coughs that gets much worse when you try to lay down to rest. So each night at bedtime, I’d lay down, desperate for the respite of sleep and instead accidentally work myself into a coughing fit. In the midst of those fits, while gasping for air I’d think “well, I can’t take singing lessons next semester” or “can you imagine how annoying this is going to be for my husband every time it’s time to sleep?” I can’t be kept from thoughts of the future, but they are suddenly always colored with the assumption that my present circumstances will stretch into forever.”

So it is with those who must take and retake their spiritual temperature to decide how firm they will be in their loyalty to God. If He doesn’t show up on their time frame, this sense of abandonment feels forever and faith is knocked. If a new question arises today, it feels like a permanent condition and old answers are discarded.

Constantly taking your spiritual temperature has at least three pitfalls.

First, we become fair weather friends to the Lord. He cannot count on us to carry out his errands, to be loyal and true. We can be sold off to the highest bidder, change our minds about who He is, abandon the cause when He was counting on us, be worn down with fatigue. This is like Moses could have been if he started up Mt. Sinai and decided to stop when his feet started hurting half-way to the top. God gives us mortal experiences, including times of silence, to teach us to be as firm, steadfast, and immovable as he is.

It is plaintive when many of Christ’s followers were abandoning him, and he said to Peter, “Will ye also go away?” (John 6: 67). Do we want to answer, “I don’t like the menu you’ve served? I don’t like the taste of this bread of life. It is too hard, too demanding. It rips at my heartstrings in ways I can’t bear.

Second, we may count God as silent when he has been talking to us all along. Sometimes it takes spiritual maturity to understand his answers which are sometimes subtle, oblique, or based on a long-term which is currently out of our purview. The Givens quote the poet R.S. Thomas who suggested that God may be speaking “in ways we have yet to recognize as speech.” It may be only in memory that we see He was always whispering to us. It may be in retrospect that we recognize that the prayers that we were offering for clarification may have been more as Kafka said “the icepick to break up the frozen sea within us.”

Sophocles said, “We must wait until the evening to see how splendid the day has been.”

Third, constantly evaluating and re-evaluating our commitment to God becomes entirely self-centered. This frantic and constant taking of our spiritual temperature has real pitfalls. Always worrying about how we feel just now and if things have made us happy enough turns our focus to ourselves. As Elder Neal A. Maxwell said, “We are so busy constantly checking our own temperatures, we fail to notice the burning fevers of others.”

Those times when God appears silent in our lives can be our time of significant opportunity to demonstrate what we are made of. Shakespeare wrote of a kind of love in one of his sonnets that we can think of it as the kind of love that we hope to show to God. He says love is “an ever-fixed mark,/That looks on tempests, and is never shaken.” He adds “love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds.”

God never alters, but, since we are mortal and fallible, our perception of what he is doing with us may change. We may not understand his silences. We may feel lonely in our solitude. At those times we can trust—trust his purposes, trust his love, trust ourselves—that we have felt before of divine love, we will feel again. If for now we are in a dry season, we know it is just a season and we will not lessen our faith in any way while we endure it.

Elder Maxwell again, “To be cheerful when others are in despair, to keep the faith when others falter, to be true even when we feel forsaken—all of these are deeply desired outcomes during the deliberate, divine tutorials which God gives to us—because He loves us. These learning experiences must not be misread as divine indifference. Instead, such tutorials are a part of the divine unfolding.”