Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
đď¸ Episode 39 â When God Feels Silent: The Dark Night of the Soul
Have you ever prayed and felt absolutely nothing? Have you been hit with doubts, spiritual confusion, or the terrifying sense that God has gone silent? In this raw and honest episode, Mark Odland shares his personal story of walking through the âdark night of the soulââa season where faith felt distant, prayer felt empty, and lifeâs pain stripped away every illusion of certainty.
Whether youâre a Christian man battling burnout, grief, doubt, or emotional numbness, this episode will help you understand what the dark night truly is, why it happens, and how God uses it to refine you into a stronger, more grounded man.
In this episode, youâll learn:
- What the âdark night of the soulâ actually isâand what it isnât
- Why even faithful Christian men can feel spiritual numbness or silence
- How grief, trauma, burnout, and father wounds can distort your view of God
- Why wrestling with God is biblical, masculine, and necessary
- How lament, honesty, and intellectual humility can strengthen your faith
- Tools for reconnecting with God when prayer feels empty
- Why doubt does not mean youâre losing your faithâand may mean youâre growing
- How God can use your darkest season to reveal purpose, calling, and strength
đ FREE BOOK for Christian Men
Get my book âEscape the Cage: A Path of Deep Healing for Menâ FREE â
https://escapethecagenow.com/subscribe/
https://escapethecagenow.com/subscribe/
đ§ Prefer Audio-Only? Listen Here:
đ Markâs Books
đ Lion Counseling Merch
đ Book a Free Consult
If youâre a high-achieving Christian man ready to break cycles of anxiety, doubt, trauma, or burnout, book a free consult:
https://escapethecagenow.com/call/
https://escapethecagenow.com/call/
About the Lion Counseling Podcast
The Lion Counseling Podcast is dedicated to helping Christian men break free, heal deep, and become the lions God created them to be. Hosted by Mark Odland, LMFT and certified EMDR therapist, each episode blends biblical wisdom, psychological insight, and real-life tools to build stronger men, stronger families, and stronger faith. New episodes drop every Tuesday.
Creators and Guests
What is Lion Counseling Podcast?
The Lion Counseling Podcast helps men escape the cages that hold them back and become the Lions they were created to be. It exists to help men obtain success, purpose, happiness, and peace in their career and personal lives. The podcast is hosted by the founder of Lion Counseling, Mark Odland (Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and Certified EMDR Therapist), and Zack Carter (Counselor and Coach with Lion Counseling). In their podcasts, they address a variety of topics relevant to men, including: mental health, relationships, masculinity, faith, success, business, and self-improvement.
The good news is no matter what intellectual objection you might have that keeps you from faith, if you dig hard enough, there are many, many very thoughtful, intellectual, faithful men and women who have gone before us, who have answers. Not perfect answers, but answers that make faith reasonable enough to stake your life on it. Okay? And so these days, there's a lot of talk about deconstruction of faith. Right?
Mark Odland:People who were leaders in Christian ministry deconstructing their faith and essentially eventually abandoning it. And, it may have come up before in our other talks, but, my challenge for myself and to others and to you, if you're in that process is if you're gonna do it, go all the way. Don't, take the, the passive, the easy, the comfortable, or the cowardly way to deconstruct faith. Test it. Find the best arguments.
Mark Odland:Find the best counters to your objections, have the humility to know that thousands, if not millions of people smarter than you and I have faced the same objections, the same doubts, the same fears, and come out on the other side with faith and faith that was stronger for the struggle. Right? We are invited like Jacob to wrestle with God. It's not bad to wrestle with God. We can wrestle.
Mark Odland:We can fight. We can grab on and say, God, I'm not gonna let go until you bless me. And if we're lucky, God and his faithfulness will relent and say this man is wrestled with men and God and will be given a new purpose, a new name, a new mission. Right? On the other side of the dark night of the soul, there is purpose, there is mission, there is redemption, and there is strength.
Mark Odland:Welcome everyone to the Lion Counseling Podcast. I'm Mark Ottland, founder of Lion Counseling and certified EMDR therapist, where our mission is to help men to break free, to heal deep, and to become the lions they were created to be. Have you ever lost your faith? Have you ever prayed or read scripture and felt absolutely nothing? Have you been tormented by doubts and fears?
Mark Odland:And if so, you're you're not alone. There's even a name for this. It's called the dark night of the soul. And so today, we're gonna dig deep in into this concept and to help you understand what it is, how to get through it, and how it can shape you into a better man. Let's jump in.
Mark Odland:Silence can be one of the most painful things that we experience when it comes to a spouse, that isn't talking to us after an argument, a grown up child who cuts off contact with their parent, the absence of a loved one who's passed away, and we, can't talk to them anymore. There's something about silence that's particularly painful. It's unnerving. It can even make us feel, frantic or desperate. So what happens when we feel that silence from God?
Mark Odland:I know a lot of our listeners here in the Lion Counseling Podcast are are Christian men, striving to be better versions of themselves. So you might be listening today. You might feel like your faith is strong today, and this doesn't apply to you. But in my experience, most Christian men, even with a strong faith, will experience something like this at some point in their journey. Or perhaps your guy listening to this, and you've always felt this way.
Mark Odland:You have your doubts about god. You you're not sure about this whole god thing, and it's never quite clicked. It's never felt real. Maybe even you would like to believe if the evidence kinda slid into place and it resonated with you, but it just hasn't yet. So what happens?
Mark Odland:What happens when our faith collides with silence? Right? Well, I'll tell you from my own experience. Alright? So I'm someone who, has always had a a deep faith, a faith that came alive in college, became stronger and stronger, even leading me into ministry, into congregational ministry, and then out of that into full time Christian counseling.
Mark Odland:It's a big part of my life. It's a big part of how I wanna raise my kids, where I draw strength and peace from in my life. My faith has been this treasure in my life. It's it's a part of my identity, part of my business, part of, who I am and and who I wanna be. But in the wake of a lot of tough things happening in my life, years ago, know, COVID hit, a lot a lot of pain associated with that for a variety of reasons, as as you all know.
Mark Odland:My dad's, illness and eventual eventual death. And then me being getting burned out as a trauma therapist, you know, Just putting in the hours, hours after hours after hours, helping people work through their pain. It started to take a toll on me. Right? And so I I just kinda I just kinda hit this wall.
Mark Odland:And there's actually a curriculum that is used in churches called emotionally healthy spirituality, also called emotionally healthy discipleship. And they talk about it in that curriculum, the wall. You hit the wall. Well, I hit that wall. I hit that wall, and I experienced strange things that I had never thought I would experience before.
Mark Odland:I would pray and feel nothing. God felt so far away. And so it felt like, my hope and my peace was totally ripped away, and a part of my identity felt ripped away because I didn't know who I was anymore. I didn't know who I was or whose I was, where I could ground my hope. I remember walking the beach, near our house and just looking at at the the waves and the sky and, and just feeling the sense of strange disbelief, the surreal feeling that all this almost feel felt, unreal to me.
Mark Odland:It felt surreal. I felt, disoriented. I started to have thoughts that were very disturbing. I I thought to myself, wow. So this is what it feels like to feel like an agnostic.
Mark Odland:This is what it feels like to feel like an atheist. Words I never thought would come out of my mouth. Right? And then I realized that for many years, what I called faith actually felt a lot like certainty, and I took that for granted. And so now I was in this place where it did not feel like certainty, and it felt like to muster up any kind of faith felt like a daunting task.
Mark Odland:Right? So it was painful. There was sadness. There was discouragement. There was feeling, out of balance in life.
Mark Odland:And what was really helpful about that class in my church was that there was a name for this, the dark night of the soul. Right? And the idea here is that if you're going through that, brother, if you listening are going through that or if you go through that someday, I want you to know that it does not mean it does not mean necessarily that you're doing anything wrong. It doesn't mean that you're being punished. And in fact, there's a strong case to be made that biblically, some of the people we think of as heroes in scripture actually went through something like that.
Mark Odland:Deep melancholy, perhaps even deep depression, doubts, fears. David experienced it. Elijah experienced it. Even Jesus himself on the cross felt forsaken, crying out, embodying the twenty second Psalm. My god.
Mark Odland:My god. Why have you forsaken me? Even our savior felt that distance. He felt that distance. He felt that abandonment.
Mark Odland:There's whole parts of scripture in this theme called lament, where there's this kind of holy honesty, where we can be real. Some of the Psalms are like this. We can be real. We can cry out to God in our despair and know that God can take that honesty. And that if we try to keep a smile on our face and pretend like everything's okay, it actually just bottles up more pain and keeps us disconnected from God.
Mark Odland:If you're going through this right now, writing a letter is a simple assignment if you choose to accept it. But getting out a piece of paper, finding a quiet place, and writing a a brutally honest letter to god about your pain, about your grief, about your doubts, about your fears. Lay it all on the table. Put it out there. God can handle it.
Mark Odland:And there's something that can be very healing and releasing about that honesty. Even if you're angry. So here's the thing. Even if you're angry at god, you can't be angry at something or someone that doesn't exist. Right?
Mark Odland:There's there's a shred of faith in anger. There's a shred of faith in doubt. Right? There's still something that binds us, that connects us to our to our father in heaven in the midst of that pain. And I suspect I suspect that just like that story of the prodigal son, right, where the the the boy basically disowns his dad and takes his inheritance early and squanders all his money on reckless living.
Mark Odland:He finds himself poor, discouraged, out of money, feeding pigs, and then with his head his head hung low his head hung low, he trudges back trudges back to his father hoping that maybe he could be a servant in his father's household. Then what does the father do? He runs to meet him with open arms. My son is lost, but now he is found, and they throw a party. The older the older brother doesn't like that.
Mark Odland:He's kinda jealous. He's like, this guy does not deserve it, but he throws a party. And that is a a reflection of the character of our father in heaven, the kind of god who created a world where there is cause and effect, and there are consequences for our actions. And yet when it comes to his relationship with us, he's always waiting with open arms to welcome us back. And, I'm guessing that humility helped, that the son came back with some humility.
Mark Odland:And sometimes it takes us being crushed to realize how much we need need god's help, how much we need our dad, our father, our father in heaven. And so here's one of the hidden gems in experiencing this dark night of the soul, right, is that it's not an experience without purpose. That if we embrace it as a time of refinement, of testing, of strengthening, God can use some of these most painful moments to build us up, to prepare us for things that we otherwise never would have been able to face or do. Right? For me, part of that was as I come came out on the other side, it was a renewed sense of calling to help other men who were going through burnout, going through a crisis of faith, going through some kind of dilemma or or pain or trauma that they need to heal.
Mark Odland:Right? I now have more empathy, more sympathy, more understanding for men who have been through those kinds of struggles. I have more empathy for my fellow men who maybe have not come to a strong faith in Christ yet because I understand their doubts better than I did before. So if you're going through this right now, brother, there is an opportunity. There's an opportunity to know if this will not last forever, that you can become stronger through it, and that there could be a purpose in the midst of this this suffering.
Mark Odland:Sometimes our faith in the silence is to be still and to try to believe that God is God even if we can't hear his voice for this season. Right? There's a beautiful prayer in scripture where a man says to Jesus when asked if he believes. He says, I believe. Help my unbelief.
Mark Odland:Talk about an honest prayer. Alright, god. I'm not even sure if you're real anymore, but I'm talking to you anyway. God, I'm not even sure you care, but here I am waiting, trusting, hoping. God, my faith right now feels as small as a little seed.
Mark Odland:And Jesus says even faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains. Even what we think is too small through God's eyes in his kingdom can be enough. It's not uncommon if you're going through this dark night of the soul to feel a kind of spiritual numbing. Right? Sometimes our own wounds with our parents, especially as men with with our dads, even really good dads are not perfect.
Mark Odland:None of us are. And so sometimes we have unmet needs that we project onto our heavenly father. That's an interesting exercise as well. How is my earthly father the same as my heavenly father as portrayed in scripture? How is he different?
Mark Odland:How have I been clay conflating the two, for better or for worse? Right? So if you're going through that if you're going through that, just remember that there is hope and that, even though it might seem like God is distant and far away, that doesn't mean he actually is. It just feels that way. Our feelings are not reality.
Mark Odland:They're our feelings. Our feelings are not us. They are something we experience. They often give us accurate information about reality, but sometimes they're miswired. Sometimes they go haywire.
Mark Odland:Sometimes they're out of tune. Right? So let's get practical. Let's get practical. What tools do we have to not just sit around and wait for the dark night to end?
Mark Odland:What tools do we have to reconnect, to know that god desires to connect with us, to love us, to embrace us? But what tools do we have to move forward to be intentional about that process? Well, one, as I mentioned earlier, is to embrace lament. Right? To read the Psalms, to read lamentations, to write that letter of lament to god.
Mark Odland:Another one is to nurture the intellectual side of us. If we're honest with ourselves, are there intellectual objections within our faith that no longer hold up? Is there a scaffolding of faith that we built our lives on, but it turned out that, that scaffolding was never tested? It can't bear the weight of grown up intellectual objections, philosophical questions. We were always told just to believe, and now we hear are confronted with something, and, it's not making sense anymore.
Mark Odland:And it feels like the whole thing is fake. Well, here's my, nugget of truth for you guys. The good news is no matter what intellectual objection you might have that keeps you from faith, if you dig hard enough, there are many, many, very thoughtful, intellectual, faithful men and women who have gone before us, who have answers. Not perfect answers, but answers that make faith reasonable enough to stake your life on it. Okay?
Mark Odland:And so these days, there's a lot of talk about deconstruction of faith. Right? People who were leaders in Christian ministry deconstructing their faith and essentially eventually abandoning it. And, it may have come up before in our other talks, but, my challenge for myself and to others and to you if you're in that process is if you're gonna do it, go all the way. Don't, take the, the passive, the easy, the comfortable, or the cowardly way to deconstruct faith.
Mark Odland:Test it. Find the best arguments. Find the best counters to your objections. Have the humility to know that thousands, if not millions of people smarter than you and I have faced the same objections, the same doubts, the same fears, and come out on the other side with faith and faith that was stronger for the struggle. Right?
Mark Odland:We are invited like Jacob to wrestle with God. It's not bad to wrestle with God. We can wrestle. We can fight. We can grab on and say, God, I'm not gonna let go until you bless me.
Mark Odland:And if we're lucky, god and his faithfulness will relent and say this man is wrestled with men and god and will be given a new purpose, a new name, a new mission. Right? On the other side of the dark night of the soul, there is purpose, there is mission, there is redemption, and there is strength. There is strength. Part of it might be going through the motions.
Mark Odland:Part of it is reading the words in scripture even if they feel lifeless. Part of it is going to worship and singing those songs even if they feel hollow. Part of it is being honest with yourself about what feeds your soul and trying to do more of that. You might have 10 things that, helped your life of faith before this experience, but now it's down to one. I know for me, a lot of things fell flat when I was going through that.
Mark Odland:But there was this one thing I could do when I when I would pray some old, when I would play old camp songs on my guitar. It's like I could let all that go, and I could I could feel a glimmer of being connected to God. My my fail my faith felt like that ember that was dying kind of, like, caught a little flame again. Right? So and then finally, again, you know, this this site, this, our website, our ministry, our podcast, it's about integrating masculinity and psychology and faith.
Mark Odland:Right? We've talked a lot about the faith side. On the psychology side, sometimes our trauma can get in the way of our faith. Sometimes our grief, our pain, our unhealed wounds can, make everything worse. And that's why, at Lion Counseling, we offer counseling services.
Mark Odland:We offer cognitive behavioral therapy to help you identify the truth and to focus on that rather than all the lies and distractions. We offer EMDR therapy to help you, do that emotional surgery on those unhealed wounds from the past, those places where, old lies and insecurities took root that make us oversensitive in the present and avoidant and distractible and angry. There is healing for that. You can get healing. So there is that psychological side that can dovetail with a spiritual side for us.
Mark Odland:Okay? So there is hope, brothers. There is hope. And, my encouragement to you is that, again, coming back to that prodigal son story, that god is the father. He is that father waiting with open arms, right, to run to meet you.
Mark Odland:Back then, it was an undignified thing for for a a grown man to kinda hike up his robe and run to meet his, to meet someone. But that's what god does. He comes down into the trenches with us. And if nothing else, I mean, just imagining Jesus sitting beside you in the silence, in the pain, in the doubt, trusting that his eyes are full of compassion. He puts that gentle hand on your shoulder.
Mark Odland:He says, I'm sorry you're going through this, but there's a purpose. I have great things in store for you. Don't give up. Don't give up. It's gonna be okay.
Mark Odland:You'll get through this. For me, it looked like getting my own EMDR therapy. It looked like lots of honest conversations with people I trust. It looked like getting spiritual direction from a certified spiritual director. It looked at, I looked at, apologetics.
Mark Odland:I looked at evidence for the resurrection. I looked at, books, cutting edge books about the advances in, science that actually see the fingerprints of God and using math and science and biology, physics to see that these things that seem to be contradictory to life of faith actually aren't so contradictory and actually might even bolster the evidence for god's existence, A good God, a good creator, a purpose behind this universe, that it is not an accident, that you are not an accident, that you are fearfully and wonderfully made, that god calls you by name, that you belong to him, and he's got great plans for you, brother. So all that being said, I I just hope and pray a blessing on you guys. I pray that, your faith increases. I faith I I pray that you find strength in the midst of your suffering.
Mark Odland:And I pray that you would not feel helpless if you feel like you're in that dark night, that you would know that there is, a purpose and that you're being refined for something great. Until next time, brothers. God bless. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.