The following is from chapter 15 of Philip Yancey's Prayer, Does It Make Any Difference?. I read this last night and wanted to share it with you. I apologize for the length of the quote.

I know a woman who did not pray for more than a year, benumbed by the fear that she must have committed the unpardonable sin. Thomas Green, a wise spiritual director, dispels that fear. We judge as immature, he says, a friend who pulls away wounded but refuses to reveal what we might have done to hurt him or her. Surely the God of love as revealed in Jesus does not act in such a childish way. Green recommends the following prayer:

Lord, you care for me more than I care for myself. I cannot believe that you are playing guessing games with me. If the dryness I experience is due to some failing of mine, you make it clear to me and I will try to remedy it. But I will not entertain vague doubts; unless and until you make my failing clear to me, I will assume that is not the reason for the dryness

I take some comfort in the fact that virtually all the masters of spirituality recount a dark night of the soul. Sometimes it passes quickly and sometimes it persists for months, even years. I have yet to find a single witness, though, who does not tell of going through a dry period. Teresa of Avila spent twenty years in a nearly prayerless state before breaking through to emerge as a master of prayer. William Cowper had prayer times in which he thought he would die from excess of joy; but later he described himself as "banished to a remoteness from God's presence, in comparison with which the distance from the East to the West is vicinity."

. . .

Religious radio and television, as well as certain books and magazines, say little of God's silence. By their accounts God seems to speak volubly, commanding this minister to build a new sanctuary and that housewife to launch a new Web-based company. God represents success, good feelings, a sense of peace, a warm glow. To an audience regaled by such inspiring stories, an encounter with the silence of God hits like a shocking exception, and stirs up feelings of inadequacy.

The exception, in fact, is the cheery optimism of modern consumer-oriented faith. For centuries Christians learned what to expect on the spiritual journey from the bumbling pilgrim in Pilgrim's Progress, from John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul, from Thomas a Kempis's challenging Imitation of Christ.

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If I suffer a time of spiritual aridity, of darkness and blankness, should I stop praying until new life enters my prayer? Every one of the spiritual masters insists, No. If I stop praying, how will I know when prayer does become alive again? And, as many Christians have discovered, the habit of not praying is far more difficult to break than the habit of praying.