A response from kinwove

Faith is a commitment. Emotion is a state.

You can commit to something while feeling nothing, the same way you show up for someone you love when you're exhausted or angry. The commitment is the real thing. The feeling either follows or it doesn't — but its absence doesn't cancel what you decided.

The New Testament uses the word pistis (πίστις) for faith — and it means something closer to trust or allegiance than belief. It's not "I think this is true" (that's more the Greek dianoia). It's "I am putting my weight on this." You can do that without a rush of certainty or warmth.

In fact, emotion can mislead you. Someone might feel deeply moved in worship one Sunday and completely sure of God's goodness. Three months later, grief or depression flattens everything and they feel nothing — and suddenly they assume the earlier feeling was real and the current emptiness proves it was all illusion. But feelings come and go on their own schedule. They follow sleep, hormones, what you ate, the weather. They are not a reliable instrument for measuring what is actually true.

This is what makes faith different from religion as a feeling-project. A lot of modern Christianity makes emotion the measure — if you don't feel God's presence, something is wrong with you. But the deeper witnesses — the Psalms, the Apostles' Creed, even Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") — separate the two cleanly. You can trust God when the feeling is gone. In fact, that's where trust becomes visible.

The feeling may return. It may not for a long time. Either way, you are not abandoned.