Pastoral Observations
As a pastor, you are afforded a front row seat into the lives of your congregation. Normally this is wonderful as you get to see their growth and share in their positive life events. Unfortunately, you also get to see the negatives and this is where you discover whether they are going to be, spiritually, a fight or flight person.
Most people react spiritually in one of two ways to challenging life circumstances, they either pull closer to the Lord or they move further away. There is no middle ground in this reaction. I have never seen anyone be neutral in their perspective towards God under difficult conditions. As a pastor it is important to work with your congregation members to guide them towards the option of drawing closer to God. The reason for this is that experience has shown me that there are seriously different likely outcomes from the two options.
Those who hold on tight to the Lord have a strong track record of emerging from their personal dark time much stronger in their relationship with God and with their friends and family. If you've read Psalm 23, this really shouldn't surprise you. Whatever form your dark valley takes while you are walking through it, you have the personal promise of the Lord that he will be walking alongside you the entire way.
Walking away from God, the biblical term is "backslider" (Proverbs 14:14), has an even stronger track record of steering people into more difficulty than they thought they were walking away from. Think "out of the frying pan, into the fire" levels of escalation of difficulties. Neither the Lord or your pastor want you to take this direction, but when God gave you freewill, it was the real thing and each of us are quite capable of walking away from him when we follow our own thoughts and preferred direction (Proverbs 14:12).
The common factors in the two different directions we can take are the Lord himself and the freewill he gives us. Everything else is down to us and a little of the randomness of life sprinkled upon us as seasoning. It is our choice whether we walk towards or away from God. That's the very essence of freewill. We have the liberty to choose, but which ever choice we make, we must acknowledge that the subsequent consequences are also a factor of our exercised freewill.
As a pastor I have spent many a time guiding people towards the Lord in their dark and difficult times and this is as it should be. But as a regular saint of the most high God, I have also personally experienced this decision multiple times and have always decided to hang on to the Lord as tight as possible through some very dark times in mine and my family’s lives. Perhaps this is one of those times where having previously been an atheist comes in useful as I know exactly what a life without the presence of the Lord in it is like and I have no desire to return to that state.
Let me wrap this up by assuring you that if everything is looking dark and difficult for you right now, choose more God, not less God in your life. Go through your valley with the Lord. Ask your friends for help. Ask your pastor for help. And if you don’t have a pastor, contact me and I’ll either connect you up or help you remotely. You've got this! And as Sir Winston Churchill so eloquently said "If you’re going through hell, keep going".