Many have described the beginning of their faith journey like falling in love. 

They have a beautiful encounter with Jesus as more than an abstract concept but as a person. They experience a desire to to spend every possible moment with Him through prayer. This season is beautiful but inevitably, over time it comes to an end.

Over time, prayer can start to feel more of a “have to” than a “get to.” Where Mass used to be a beautiful routine, you might find yourself accidentally zoning out. Once you might have felt like you couldn’t help but tell your friends and family about your relationship with Jesus but now sharing your faith feels more like a dreaded obligation. 

In this season, it can feel like the only thing that makes sense is to go back to that thing that initially inspired your passion for faith.

 In our attempt to recover that “falling in love” feeling we used to have towards Jesus, we find ourselves attending conferences and programs, listening to podcast after podcast, and trying to conjure up any sort of sincerity we can.

Over time this turns into a cycle: we experience an “encounter with God” so we try to reorient ourselves around following Him but eventually lose fervor and fall back into deep-rooted habits. We find ourselves navigating a never-ending series of spiritual highs followed by deep spiritual lows. Done repeatedly over a lifetime, this cycle is spiritually exhausting.

In John 10:10, Jesus says “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Clearly he intends more for us than a cycle of spiritual and emotional exhaustion: in the example of His life, He shows us the way to abundance and joy.

In Matthew 17:1-13. Jesus goes up to a mountain with His three closest friends and there He is revealed to them in His heavenly glory. It overwhelms the disciples; all they want is to stay there with Him forever. Why wouldn’t they? This is the most beautiful and exciting moment they have experienced in their lives thus far: they have had an encounter with God.

But Jesus breaks the typical cycle right here. Instead of staying there with them, He walks with them back down the mountain and immediately they step right back into their ordinary rhythm of life with Him: spending time with Him, learning how to be like Him, and doing His work of healing and saving the lost.

These emotional and life-changing encounters with God are incredible. They have the power to set our lives on a whole new trajectory and inspire us to be like Jesus. That being said, Jesus’ intention is not for us to spend our lives seeking these kinds of encounters with Him; He still wants to meet with us but far more often it’s in the ordinary moments of day-to-day life rather than at the climax of a worship song or a well-produced conference.

So with that in mind, here are three simple ways you can start to break the cycle of spiritual exhaustion and start to seek God in day-to-day life.

1 - Ask God who he is making you into over time

When we’re stuck in the cycle of seeking emotional experiences from God, we can lose sight of what God is doing in the ordinary moments. As much as God wants our hearts, He wants our habits and daily rhythms too. If we don’t ask who God wants us to become, we risk building and living into habits that don’t make us into that person. When we know who God wants us to become over time, we become more open to letting Him use the ordinary moments to transform us and not just the exciting ones.

2 - Start to identify your way of life

For all of us, day-to-day life is built up of little habits and rhythms. We might not think much of these but the cumulative effect of them has a lot to do with who you become. As you start to identify the person God wants you to become, start to ask yourself if your habits and rhythms are helping you or hindering you in your progress and see if there are any He is calling you to leave behind and any He is calling you to take up. Some great starter habits for bringing God into your day-to-day life could include:

  • A short time of daily Scripture reading and silence

  • The Examen (link to article)

  • Taking a day of rest once a week on Sundays (link to article)

  • Spending time in nature appreciating the beauty of God

  • Having regular time with a Christian community

3 - Start small, go slow

Becoming the person God made you to be is a process that takes decades, not years. It’s the cumulative effect of a life of habits ordered towards your relationship with God. Just because the holy people you know pray for an hour every day or fast every week doesn’t mean you need to start there. It’s okay to choose something small that doesn’t overwhelm you and build it up over time.

More than any particular technique though, learning how to break out of a sequence of spiritual exhaustion is about letting God transform our day-to-day. It means adopting a disposition of heart that is humble. From this place, we can surrender our emotional experiences of God, letting Him work in the exciting moments but also in the mundane ones. This way of life might not feel as dynamic as it did early on in your relationship with God but over time, through the ordinary, we come to experience the abundant life Jesus promised us.