1- A person should never be discouraged from coming close to Hashem. One should not think that they cannot feel any love for Hashem during prayer. Even someone who has a love of material things and thinks about materialism all day has the ability to swing himself to the other extreme and experience a genuine love of Hashem during prayer. The only condition necessary is that he sincerely applies himself and tries his best to reveal his love of Hashem during prayer. During Exile we are like dreamers that accomplish things that are normally impossible.
2- Hashem wants us to be involved in material occupations and professions, but for a higher purpose than just for the sake of making money. Even if we are working to make money to support our families, which is a noble cause, we need to remember that there is a much deeper purpose to our material occupations. The main purpose is to connect the physical world with Hashem by connecting it to a Jewish person who serves Hashem throughout the day. The money that they earn can then be used to help them serve Hashem. When we remember that our material occupation is ultimately meant to connect the physical world to Hashem and make it into a dwelling place for Him, then our physical work doesn't contradict our love of Hashem. We are then able to look at our physical life as another means of connecting to Hashem, and as a continuation of the love of Hashem that we experience during prayer.
3- A person may get discouraged that they don’t have a highly developed understanding of Hashem's greatness. We see setbacks in our service of Hashem from things that happen that we cannot understand (like tragedies, G-d forbid, or just the fact that we are still in Exile). In exile, we cannot see the full picture. We are like someone who is dreaming. If someone has a terrible dream, that doesn’t mean that reality is terrible; as soon as he wakes up, the difficulties he had in his dream will instantly vanish.
When Moshiach comes and Hashem becomes fully revealed, we will wake up from the non-reality of all the hardships and confusions of Exile that presently seem to be real. We will take with us all the accomplishments of our service of Hashem. So, Exile is like a dream in the sense that the suffering and confusion and concealment will disappear forever. But it is not like a dream in the sense that everything that we accomplish in Torah and Mitzvos is real and eternal. It is even more real than what we can accomplish after Moshiach comes. This is because now is the time that requires self-sacrifice to live with the reality of Torah and Mitzvos, despite perceiving the false reality of the dream of Exile. When we realize that our suffering is only like a bad dream and a temporary distortion of reality, but our service of Hashem is infinitely real, this helps us stay strong in the last few moments of Exile.
