The Bible says if you search for God you will find him, but I know of several atheists who are former Christians who say they searched wholeheartedly for God and didn’t find him. One said compared his former faith to a good dream, which seemed so real while it happened, but eventually ended. How would you respond to this?
Can I take a rather cold-blooded, but I hope not uncharitable view?
How did they search?
What did they expect to find?
Disembodied voices? Mystical visions? An all-encompassing sense of fulfillment and transcendent union? The fulfillment of all their wishes?
Some do, but I expect those are rather unusual experiences for Christians.
Most of the rest of us have to work hard and ceaselessly at the process of approaching God, through daily prayer, through charity, through keeping the Commandments, through the sacraments, through looking for Christ in your fellow man, through resisting temptation, through reading holy scripture. You’re not guaranteed some kind of mystical experiential proof of God from all of this, and some of our greatest saints and most saintly people (St. John of God, Mother Teresa) still experienced crippling periods of crippling doubt. They remained steadfast though.
You do all those things, and you are likely to feel closer to, and communion with, God. If you don’t, or if you did and the feeling fades (as your friend described) you keep doing them anyway because the payoff is not in achieving
b because you did
a. It doesn’t work like that.
You do all those things because you have extended a reasoned (i.e., there’s some kind of reason) belief towards God, and it could be as simple as you feel that belief in God is more reasonable than not, or even that you simply prefer to believe in a world with God than in a world where you don’t. I know some people who believe in God because of the way that a piece of music about God made them feel. I doubt that God much cares why you come to Him, and there are many paths, he’s just glad you came. And then you do it because Jesus is our Lord and he told us to do it. Period. Not because you can come to “know” him or even because you can achieve salvation.
I don’t know if you can describe any of those paths as “Faith.” I think Faith isn’t getting on the path, that’s just a decision (albeit a good one.) Faith is the process of staying on the path once you made the choice to start traveling on it. It’s G.K. Chesterton’s definition of Faith that I hold - keeping to a reasoned belief despite what our changing moods tell us.
