God Isn’t Ignoring You—He’s Intervening

You’re exhausted—but you keep going. You’re not falling apart, but you’re definitely not okay. You’re functioning because you don’t have the luxury not to. And if you're honest, you’ve started to wonder if maybe this is just what life with God is supposed to feel like: always stretching, always pushing, always pouring—but never quite seeing the fruit. It’s not just confusing anymore. It’s starting to feel cruel. You wouldn’t say it out loud, but somewhere deep down, it feels like you’re being punished. You’ve stayed faithful. You’ve worked hard. You’ve done everything you were taught to do. But the pain isn’t letting up, and the silence from God is starting to sound like distance—or disapproval. You know He’s good, but that goodness feels unreachable. And somewhere in the tension between what you believe and what you’re experiencing, your view of God is quietly shifting.

If I’m doing everything “right,” why do I still feel so empty?

The distance you’re feeling? It’s not divine—it’s dysregulation. You’ve been making decisions from pressure instead of peace, bracing instead of abiding. You’ve been trying to obey God with a nervous system that’s constantly in survival mode. And the reason you’re not seeing fruit isn’t because God is ignoring you—it’s because He refuses to validate a pattern that misrepresents who He is.

God doesn’t disciple you through burnout. He doesn’t grow you through fear. He’s not standing silently on the sidelines, waiting for you to collapse so He can say, “Now you’re ready.” That’s not how He loves. That’s not how He leads. And He will not reinforce the lie that faithfulness requires self-abandonment or that spiritual maturity means performing exhaustion with a smile.

If you keep succeeding while spiritually misaligned and emotionally shut down, you’ll start to believe God is just as cold and withholding as your trauma-trained obedience makes Him seem. But He’s not—and He won’t let you keep building a life that reinforces that false version of Him.

We’re not the first ones to get stuck in that tension. The book of Haggai gives us a front-row seat to a people who were faithful, frustrated, and emotionally shut down. They had returned from exile and started rebuilding, but when their obedience didn’t produce quick results, they quietly pivoted to self-preservation. The temple remained unfinished—not because they didn’t love God, but because their disappointment made delay feel justifiable. Their pain got spiritualized. Their discouragement got disguised as wisdom. “It’s not time yet,” they said (Haggai 1:2).

But God stepped in—not to shame them, but to realign them.

This month, we’re anchoring ourselves in Haggai chapter 1 to confront what happens when obedience gets entangled with over-functioning, when spiritual delay becomes emotional avoidance, and when performance starts replacing presence. We’re exploring how God interrupts those patterns—not to punish, but to invite us back to Himself—and how He lovingly refuses to let us carry the weight of lives He never asked us to build without Him.