Life & Wisdom Quote by William Gurnall

A withdrawing God is a terrifying idea if you treat faith as a steady supply line of comfort. Gurnall flips that expectation on purpose. Writing in the shadow of England's religious upheavals and Puritan spiritual rigor, he aims at a common devotional panic: when God feels absent, people assume they have been abandoned, or that prayer has failed. His line insists the opposite. The Christian life, in his frame, is not validated by constant consolation but by fidelity when the consolations dry up.

The intent is pastoral and disciplinary at once. "Must trust" is not gentle suggestion; it's a commandment aimed at the inner weather of believers who mistake emotional brightness for divine favor. The genius of "withdrawing" is its agency. God isn't missing like a lost object; God steps back. That implies a pedagogy. Withdrawal becomes a kind of spiritual strength training: removing the felt presence so the believer learns to live by promise rather than sensation, by covenant rather than mood.

Subtextually, Gurnall is also policing a theology of entitlement. If God is allowed to be "withdrawing", then faith is no longer a transaction ("I do devotion, God pays me with reassurance"). It's allegiance under blackout conditions. In the Puritan imagination, that turns suffering and dryness into meaningful terrain rather than scandal: the absence itself can be a test, a purification, even a protection against spiritual pride. The line works because it names the ache honestly while refusing to let that ache become the final authority.