Across the enormous diversity of Christian experience — different cultures, different centuries, different struggles, different temperaments — a consistent set of practices emerges that tend to sustain people through seasons of difficulty. Not as a formula or a guaranteed program, but as the habits that have proved most consistently life-giving across the breadth of the Christian tradition:
Honest prayer. Not the performance of faith, not the insistence that everything is fine, not the recitation of words that don't correspond to inner reality — but honest conversation with God about exactly what is actually happening. The psalms are the permission structure for this. If David could write Psalm 88, you can say what is actually in your heart.
Scripture — even when it feels flat. The dark night of the soul specifically strips the felt pleasure of Scripture. The instruction for that season is not to stop reading but to read differently — slower, more like listening than analyzing, with the expectation that something will land rather than the determination to extract a lesson. Genesis. The Gospels. The Psalms. Read them not as documents to master but as the voice of someone who knows you.
Community — especially when you want to withdraw. The instinct in most forms of spiritual struggle is to pull away from community — out of shame, or pain, or the desire not to burden others, or the sense that the community cannot handle what you are carrying. The instinct is understandable and consistently counterproductive. The community of the church, at its best, is the place where your faith is carried by others when you cannot carry it yourself. Finding even one person who can hold the struggle alongside you without demanding its resolution is worth the vulnerability it requires.
Service. The consistent testimony across the Christian tradition is that the person who serves others in a season of personal spiritual difficulty finds that the act of service redirects attention from inward suffering to outward love — and that this redirection is itself healing. Not escapism, but the discovery that the person who focuses entirely on their own struggle tends to spiral inward, while the person who manages to serve another person in the middle of their struggle tends to find the spiral interrupted.
The long game. The most common feature of testimonies from people who have navigated deep seasons of spiritual struggle is the observation that what they could not see in the middle of the struggle was the thread of God's faithfulness running through it. They could only see it in retrospect. This is not a comfort you can manufacture in the middle of the struggle — but it is a pattern that the record of Christian experience consistently confirms.