You’ve seen the glow on their face when they come home from the youth camp.
Something happened there. Something real. They felt God in a way they’d never felt before. The worship hit different. The speaker said something that pierced right through. They made commitments, shed tears, experienced the presence of God so tangibly they could almost touch it.
And you’re grateful. Of course you’re grateful. You’ve prayed for this. You’ve hoped for exactly this kind of spiritual awakening.
Or perhaps your teenager’s experience was different. They came home quiet. Unchanged. They watched everyone else have “a moment” while they felt nothing at all. And you noticed something else shift in their eyes. Not the post-camp crash, but something that might be worse: the quiet conclusion that they’re somehow spiritually broken. That everyone else can feel God except them.
Either way, what happens in the weeks that follow tends to look the same.
Three weeks pass. Six, sometimes. The glow fades (or the emptiness deepens). The commitments slip. The presence that seemed so real at camp now seems distant. And you watch something shift in their eyes. Confusion. Disappointment. Or the beginning of a quiet conclusion: something must be wrong with me.
I’ve spent years studying how adults navigate their spiritual lives, analyzing thousands of conversations across nearly 400 surveys with over 24,000 total responses. And one of the most consistent patterns I see is this: people who were taught (often unintentionally) that emotional intensity equals spiritual authenticity end up exhausted, confused, and cycling between highs and crashes for years.
I’m not writing this to diminish what your teenager experienced. The mountaintop was real. But I think there’s something happening in how we frame these experiences that sets young people up for a particular kind of struggle later.
The Metric We Don’t Realize We’re Teaching
Consider youth ministry, worship experiences, and spiritual retreats: they’re often structured around emotional peaks.
This isn’t necessarily wrong. Emotional experiences can be genuine encounters with God. I want to be clear about that, because I’m not here to strip the sacred from moments that were sacred. The problem comes when emotional intensity becomes the primary evidence that something spiritual is happening.
Think about the implicit message: The worship gets louder, the lights go down, the moment builds, and then comes the invitation. The tears flow. The hands go up. The decisions get made.
What are we teaching about when God shows up? That it feels like this. Intense. Overwhelming. Unmistakable.
And what happens when Tuesday comes and it doesn’t register that way anymore?
This is what it looks like when it fully forms: In my research, 60% of spiritually seeking adults said they believe the Holy Spirit is basically their intuition. Their gut feeling. The divine is no longer speaking to them from outside; it’s speaking through them from inside. When we teach young people that emotional intensity is how you know God is present, we’re laying the groundwork for this exact shift. Feeling becomes the metric for the divine.
(I get it. I do. I spent years trusting my intuition as if it were the voice of God. The appeal is obvious: it’s immediate, it’s personal, it seems like connection. But I’ve also seen where that road leads when feelings become unreliable. More on that in a minute.)
The Crash They Don’t Know How to Name
There’s a concept that shows up constantly in my research. Adults call it the “Dark Night of the Soul.” It’s this period of spiritual emptiness, disconnection, doubt. A sense that God has gone silent or distant.
What strikes me is how universal this experience is among spiritually seeking adults. Eighty-five percent believe you can go through this dark night “as many as needed.” It’s not a one-time crisis. It’s a recurring pattern. And crucially, 40% describe it as a “spiritual process,” not a mental health crisis. They’ve built a mental model that expects the crash. But that model doesn’t prevent the pain. It just gives it a name.
The hidden belief underneath: if emotional intensity is how you know God is present, then emotional emptiness must mean God has left. The crash isn’t just uncomfortable. It registers as abandonment. As spiritual failure.
Young people who’ve been formed to equate God’s presence with emotional experience don’t have language for what happens when the feelings stop. They conclude they’ve done something wrong. Or that God has rejected them. Or that the whole thing was fake to begin with.
(The question that haunts many of them later: “Is this my intuition or just my anxiety?” When your feelings become the primary way you discern God’s voice, and then your feelings become unreliable, you’re left with no way to know what’s real. The adults I study describe trying to distinguish “a calm, neutral knowing” from an “emotionally charged fear,” and often they can’t. The metric they were given simply doesn’t work in ordinary life.)
A Word to You, the One Watching This Happen
If you’re a parent, a youth pastor, a mentor reading this, I need you to know I’m not writing to make you feel guilty about that retreat you planned or the worship night that was transformative. Those experiences matter. God does show up in powerful ways sometimes.
I’m writing this because I’ve seen where these patterns lead. I’ve talked to hundreds of adults who are still cycling between spiritual highs and crashes because no one ever gave them a way of understanding ordinary faith. They’re exhausted. Not from lack of spiritual experience, but from too much of the wrong kind. They’ve had breakthrough after breakthrough, awakening after awakening, and they’re still searching for something that holds through the ordinary days.
When I ask adults what the hardest parts of spiritual growth are, the top answers aren’t what you’d expect. It’s not “hearing God” or “having powerful experiences.” It’s “Releasing Attachments” (34.4%) and “Trusting the Process” (27.5%). The hardest thing isn’t getting the high. It’s learning to walk without it.
And I don’t want that for the young people in your life.
What Nobody Told Them About Ordinary Faith
I wish someone had told me earlier: most of the Christian life doesn’t resemble a worship concert.
Most days, prayer sounds like talking into the silence. Most Scripture reading doesn’t come with goosebumps. Most obedience happens without any emotional payoff at all.
This isn’t a failure of faith. It’s the nature of relationship.
Think about any long-term relationship. The early days are often emotionally intense. You can’t stop thinking about the person. Every interaction seems significant. But if that intensity is the only proof the relationship is real, you’re in trouble when it inevitably calms down.
The same is true with God. The intensity of early encounters isn’t meant to be the permanent state. It’s more like a gift for the beginning of the journey. Training wheels of presence. Something to get you started before you learn to walk by faith in the ordinary.
I think of a woman I know (I’ll call her Sarah) who’s been walking with God for thirty years. Her faith doesn’t look like the testimonies you hear at conferences. It looks like getting up every morning, opening her Bible even when she doesn’t want to, praying even when the words seem hollow, showing up to church even during seasons when she wondered if any of it was real. No dramatic encounters. No heavens-parting revelations. Just faithfulness. Day after ordinary day.
She told me once that the silence used to terrify her. She’d grown up in a church where God was always doing something, always speaking, always moving. When the silence came, she thought she’d lost Him.
“It took me years,” she said, “to realize He was still there. He just wasn’t performing for me anymore. And I had to learn that was okay. That it might even be better.”
That’s the formation I wish more of us had received. And the formation I think our young people desperately need.
The Reframe That Changed Everything for Me
The thought that won’t leave me alone:
The silence isn’t abandonment. It’s where faith learns to walk without training wheels.
Read that again if you need to.
Because the silence isn’t God withdrawing. It might be God trusting you with more. Trusting that the foundation is solid enough to hold even when you can’t sense His hand on your back anymore. Trusting that you’ve grown past the training-wheels phase into something deeper.
Jesus Himself talked about this. In John 20, Thomas refuses to believe unless he can see and touch the wounds. Jesus lets him, but then says something striking: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29, NLT).
There’s a blessing, Jesus says, for faith that doesn’t require the intense, tangible experience. For trust that persists when the feelings fade.
That’s not a lesser faith. According to Jesus, it’s a more blessed one.
It makes me wonder about how we form young believers. Are we teaching them to seek the Thomas experience (which Jesus graciously provided, but clearly considered second-best)? Or are we preparing them for the blessed path of believing without seeing?
The Psalm That Doesn’t End Well
There’s a psalm that haunts me. Psalm 88.
It’s the darkest psalm in the entire Bible. And unlike almost every other lament, it doesn’t end with resolution. No “but I will trust in you.” No rescue narrative. No morning after the weeping. It ends: “Darkness is my closest friend” (Psalm 88:18, NLT).
And somehow, that’s still Scripture.
God included it. The prayer book of the Bible has room for seasons when the only honest prayer is the one that doesn’t get better by the end. When darkness seems closer than comfort. When you’ve called out and the silence has stretched so long you’re not sure anyone’s listening anymore.
What would it teach us if we spent as much time in the lament psalms as we do chasing worship experiences? If we gave young people language for the darkness that doesn’t shame them for being there? If we showed them that the Bible itself contains prayers where God doesn’t show up with goosebumps and tears of joy, and those prayers are still considered sacred?
(The Psalms are roughly one-third lament. One-third. We’ve traded that for songs that always resolve upward, and I wonder if we’ve accidentally communicated that faith without good feelings isn’t real faith at all.)
The Capacity We’re Not Building
When emotional intensity is the only lens for encountering God, we’re not building the capacity for ordinary faithfulness.
We’re building people who need the next retreat, the next conference, the next worship experience to believe their faith is real. Who interpret every spiritual dry season as crisis. Who don’t have language for sustaining trust when God seems distant.
What they needed earlier, what our young people need now, is a way of understanding faith that doesn’t depend on emotional proof. A way of walking with God that survives the silence. Practices that sustain rather than just ignite.
There’s something in Romans 12 about presenting ourselves as “living sacrifices.” It’s this image of daily, ongoing, ordinary offering. Not the dramatic altar-call moment, but the unglamorous Tuesday morning obedience. Paul calls it “true and proper worship” (Romans 12:1, NLT), and I find myself asking what it would look like to teach that as central rather than supplementary.
The worship Paul describes isn’t the mountaintop variety. It’s the everyday, showing-up-anyway, reasonable-service kind. The kind that might not make for a good Instagram story but forms people who can weather the valleys.
Some Questions Worth Asking
I don’t have a formula for this. But here are some questions that stay with me:
How do we normalize spiritual seasons where God seems distant, not as crisis but as a normal part of the journey? How do we teach young people that the silence doesn’t mean absence?
Are there ways to honor genuine emotional experiences without making them the primary evidence of God’s presence? To say “that was real AND it’s not the only way faith works”?
What practices build capacity for ordinary faithfulness? Things like fixed-hour prayer, liturgy, the slow discipline of Scripture reading that doesn’t depend on emotional payoff. The stuff that seems boring until you realize it’s the only thing holding you steady when the intensity fades.
And the question underneath all of them: what are we modeling? Because if adults are still chasing the next spiritual high, still treating emotional intensity as the proof of God’s presence, why would teenagers develop anything different?
What I’m Still Figuring Out
I won’t pretend I’ve mastered this. I still love a good worship experience. I still remember the moments when God felt undeniably close, when the presence was so thick I could barely breathe.
But I’ve also learned, slowly and sometimes painfully, that those moments aren’t the foundation. They’re gifts along the way. The foundation is something quieter. More ordinary. The daily showing up, the repeated trust, the unglamorous faithfulness that doesn’t make for a good testimony but somehow becomes the thing that holds.
I spent years believing that as long as I kept Jesus in the mix somewhere, I was still on a Christian path. That my intuition was reliable. That feeling close to God and being close to God were the same thing. It took a long season of silence, of sensing I’d lost something, to realize that faith built on feeling alone is faith built on sand.
The young people in your life will have emotional experiences of God. That’s good. But they’ll also have seasons where God seems silent, distant, absent. And what they do in those seasons will depend on what lens you’ve given them.
If the only lens is “feeling God = God is here,” the silence will devastate them.
But if they’ve learned that faith persists through feeling and not-feeling, that ordinary obedience is worship too, that the silence isn’t abandonment, they might be able to walk through the dark nights without concluding that something is fundamentally wrong.
We’re not trying to eliminate the mountaintop experiences. We’re trying to build people who can survive the valleys between them.
If You Want to Try Something Small
I’m not going to give you a five-step program for fixing youth ministry. That’s not what this is about. But if anything here resonated, here’s one small thing you could try:
Next time you’re with the young person in your life during a spiritually “ordinary” moment (not a retreat, not a worship night, just a regular Tuesday), tell them that this counts too. That showing up when it doesn’t feel magical is the deeper work. You don’t have to make it a lecture. Just one sentence: “This is faith too.”
If they’re in a spiritual dry season and think something’s wrong with them, try this: “You know, some of the greatest prayers in the Bible don’t end with everything feeling better. There’s a psalm that just ends with ‘darkness is my closest friend.’ And somehow that’s still in there. God has room for this part of your journey too.”
If they didn’t have “the experience” at camp while everyone else seemed to, you might say: “Jesus said there’s a blessing for people who believe without needing to see and feel everything. That’s not second-class faith. It might be harder. And more real.”
You’re not going to undo a whole formation approach in one conversation. But you might plant something. A different possibility. A permission slip they didn’t know they needed.
That might be enough to start building something that holds.
And look, you don’t have to have this figured out either. None of us do. We’re all finding our way toward formation practices that work for the long haul.
One conversation at a time. One ordinary Tuesday at a time.
