There's a special kind of humiliation in walking into a room and having no idea why you're there. Thirty seconds ago you were a capable adult on a mission. Now you're standing in the laundry room staring at a bottle of fabric softener, hoping it'll offer some guidance. It won't. In the entire history of laundry, fabric softener has never once known why anybody came in.
It isn't entirely your fault. Researchers at Notre Dame have studied this, and it has a name: the doorway effect. Walking through a door tells your brain that one scene has ended and another has begun, so it shelves whatever you were thinking about. Your brain is doing exactly what it was built to do. It just has the timing of a four-year-old who announces he needs the bathroom the minute you merge onto the freeway.
So you go back to the kitchen, stand on the same spot where the thought first showed up, and wait for it to wander back. Sometimes it does. Sometimes you remember three other things instead, none of which will get your clothes any cleaner.
A lot of us are standing in that laundry room with our faith. We never walked away from God in any dramatic way. We just walked through a lot of doorways: a new job, a move, a couple of kids, a decade that went by faster than anybody warned us. Somewhere along the way we lost track of why it mattered. We still believe. We'd just have a hard time explaining what we came in for.
Jesus sent a message to a church with exactly this problem. The believers in Ephesus worked hard, had their theology straight and held up under pressure, but they'd lost the love they had at first. And he didn't blame the doorways: "Consider how far you have fallen! Repent and do the things you did at first." Go back to the kitchen, in other words. Stand where you were standing when grace still felt like good news and prayer felt like talking to somebody, and see what comes back.
It's worth the trip. And while you're there, you might even remember what you wanted in the laundry room. (It was the fabric softener. It's always the fabric softener.)