Why does God feel distant?

I grew up walking a highland road to my aunt’s village, and at the end of it stood a deep well. The water was real. You could smell it, you could hear it answer a dropped pebble. But on the days I remember best, that well had no rope and no bucket, and I stood over more water than I could drink in a lifetime and could not touch one drop of it. Thirsty, at a well.

Most people who tell me God feels distant are standing exactly there. They do not doubt that He exists; they doubt the access. The woman of Samaria said it to His face:

Notice what she granted and what she doubted. The water, she believed in. The reaching of it, she had given up on. And that is the modern heart precisely: some depth under reality, some rumor of living water, and no rope in sight, so we adjust our schedules and keep drawing from wells we can manage: work, approval, the glowing well in our pockets, even religious routine. Each one is honest water, and each fails honestly, a little sooner each year.

Here is what I want you to see: the ache you call distance is not evidence of His absence. Hunger is not evidence that food is imaginary. Your thirst, honestly faced, is the most theological thing you have ever felt; it insists you were made for Someone, the way panting insists on water. The distance you feel is a riverbed remembering its river.

And the gospel’s answer to the distance is not a ladder of effort. Look where the woman met Him: not on the far mountain of her theology, not at the end of a long climb of reformation, but at the rim, at noon, at the exact coordinates of her daily thirst. She did not ascend to the Water. The Water came to the rim.

He still chooses that geometry. Expect Him on your ordinary route, at your avoided hour, inside your actual thirst, not somewhere holier. Come to Him today the way a thirsty man comes, without pretending otherwise, and say so plainly. The sentence this book leans on more than any other has no conditions attached: “him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out” (John 6:37). The distance ends where the coming begins.