everything that's on my mind

I occasionally write about struggles with faith, doubt, and the spiritual questions that, to me at least, don’t seem to have good answers (as I did recently.) I’m currently reading Jason Boyett’s book O Me Of Little Faith: True Confessions Of A Spiritual Weakling, and came across this section where he relates some of his thoughts on faith, doubt and hope. I can definitely relate and it probably describes best where I am most of the time.

Where does my dissatisfaction and doubt come from? I want to explain it in terms of my human limitations. I am a finite creature. God is the infinite Creator. Of course I will struggle to comprehend him – there are limits to my understanding, and I doubt when I bump up against those limits. That’s a nice, comforting theory until I meet the spiritual heavyweights who never seem to reach those limits. Not every Christian doubts like I do. Some Christians don’t seem to doubt at all.

These are the types of believers I mentioned in the first chapter who live spiritually intense lives in which God, from their perspective, seems continually active and present. A new customer shows up out of the blue? God wants to bless their business. A random encounter with someone unexpected? God brought that person into their life for a reason. A song lyric or Bible verse gets stuck in their head? God must be trying to tell them something.

It simply doesn’t occur to them that some things -like seeing an old friend at the coffee shop – happen by chance, which is typically how I would describe it. Or that there’s science to explain why certain songs or phrases get trapped in a mental loop and stick there all day long. These super ¬believers’ lives are so full of God that there’s no room for doubt. They rarely ask questions, and when they do, the answers are not the findings of science. The answers are supernatural. The answers are usually the same: God.

God is rarely my go-to explanation. On the contrary, my life is so full of doubt that I can’t find room for God. Does that make me a bad Christian? Am I a bad Christian because I do ask hard questions? Am I a bad Christian because explaining every detail as “God at work in my life” seems like religious narcissism instead of profound faith?

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

My mother worries that I think too much. She knows I struggle with these questions, but she doesn’t understand where they come from. Most of the questions I ask have never occurred to her. To her my faith must seem ridiculously complicated, filled with challenges and arguments and skepticism. And she’s right. We have different personalities. Our brains are bent in different directions. She had the same religious upbringing that I had, but we are not alike. For some, faith is a direct line between them and God. For me, faith is a tangled, knotted rope.

You can see my dilemma. When it comes to matters of faith, I find more common ground among atheists and agnostics than I do with doubt-free Christians. But I still believe. Given the choice between the turtle stack of faith or the turtle stack of atheism/agnosticism/unbelief, I choose faith, despite my doubts.

Why? Mainly, because I hope. “Faith is being sure of what we hope for,” the author of Hebrews wrote, “and certain of what we do not see” (11:1). I’m not exactly “certain” of anything, but I’m sure of what I hope for: I hope there’s something more than a dust-to-dust, grow-old-and-then-you-die material existence. I hope God exists.

I want there to be a greater purpose, and I want that purpose to be something more than the human altruism favored by the nonreligious. I hope that my life matters ¬not just to the people around me, but in an eternal sense. I hope I have a soul that will outlive this body. I hope there’s a Creator who really does care about those made in his image and who interacts with his creation. I hope that the tragedies and problems of our world will someday be washed out by renewal, that good will someday prevail, that evil will be punished, that sin and heartache will eventually be no more.

I hope the message of the Bible is true. I hope life is more than molecules and mathematics. I hope death is not the end. That hope is why I believe in God.

And if you’re interested, Boyett posted some quotes regarding doubt at his blog just this morning.

In his song “I Remember (It’s Happening Again)”, Griffin House sings about war, including the tragedy and suffering it causes. In the song’s final verse, he sings of a friend who is “fighting for our country” in the middle East, and near the end says, “I need a reason why.”

Everyone has felt that way at some point, and not just about matters of war and it’s justification. Injustice and suffering exist in abundance in our world. We see it every day in the news or in our lives. And “why” is often the question on our minds, if not on our lips.

A couple of years ago, I read Bart Ehrman’s book “God’s Problem: How The Bible Fails To Answer Our Most Important Question – Why We Suffer.” Part of Ehrman’s disillusionment with the Christian faith he once held to (he now considers himself agnostic) was his inability to find a satisfactory answer to that question: why do we suffer?

Many of the questions Ehrman asks in his book are questions I have as well. And many of the biblical answers he rejects are likewise difficult for me to swallow. Like Ehrman, I want to know why, and for some reason, the older I get, the more difficult I find it to accept the standard answers.

Just last week, another event not too far from my home brought these questions back to my mind yet again. Flash floods killed 20 people who were camping in western Arkansas, leaving families without loved ones for no apparent reason other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two families camping together lost six members between them.

Candace Smith lost her husband Anthony Smith, 30, 5-year-old son Joey and 2-year-old daughter Katelynn. They were from Gloster, Louisiana.

Kerri Basinger lost her husband Shane 34, daughters Kinsley 6, and Jadyn 8. Jadyn was the 20th victim found Monday. They are from Shreveport, Louisiana.

I’ve seen report after report on both local and national news over the last several days, and it’s so difficult to watch. Why did it happen? There is no answer. Some would say that’s fine, that we don’t and won’t understand everything now. For me, that does nothing to quell the questions. I need a reason why.

We used to sing a hymn in the church I grew up in that includes the line, “we’ll understand it all by and by.” I’m not certain we’ve been promised that to begin with, but it is beyond my ability to comprehend how senseless death and suffering can be explained adequately. If eternity has all of the answers, why can’t it share them with us now?

Perhaps my frustration with this lack of explanation (or, at the least, a perceived lack) and my struggle with doubt clouds my vision. Philip Yancey has always been one of my favorite Christian writers. Just this morning, a post on his Facebook page quoted from one of his books:

Doubt is the skeleton in the closet of faith and I know no better way to treat a skeleton than to bring it into the open and expose it for what it is: not something to hide or fear, but a hard structure on which living tissue may grow.

Doubt was never exactly looked upon favorably as I grew up in the church. I don’t really recall hearing much about it, and if I did, it was clear that it was not a good thing. But for me, it has grown significantly since my youth. I always thought faith would be easier as I grew older. Instead, it seems the opposite is more often the norm.

God is supposed to be in control, but when flood waters wash children away from their parents and husbands away from their wives, it’s hard to have faith that this is true. Whatever it is that we’re supposed to find out “by and by” might be helpful about now, because in the present, it sucks to be in the dark about why these things happen.

Yet I have hope that Yancey’s quote is accurate. Perhaps good can come from the doubt and the anger as well, and perhaps someday the answers to the question will seem more acceptable, or at least not as necessary. Maybe faith will be enough.

Until then, the question remains.

I’ve been struggling to get any reading done in the last week or so. I put Spong’s book on hold to quickly knock out Donald Miller’s new book, and then came back to Spong. However, I’ve only managed one chapter in the last week. If you know much about John Shelby Spong’s work and about my own church background, you know there are some significant differences in the things he says and what I’ve heard most of my life.

In that chapter, in which he examines the relationship between ecology and theology, Spong discusses the elements of the theistic definition of God – that “God is a divine being who comes to us from outside this life”, that he rules from outside this world. One of the elements of this definition, he contends, is the idea that it speaks to people’s need for security. Believing in “a miracle worker in the sky who can come to our aid” is comforting.

He goes on to suggest, however, that this idea of God should have disappeared a long time ago. He says:

There is not a theistic God who exists to take care of you or me. There is no God who stands ready to set aside the laws by which this universe operates to come to our aid in time of need. There are no everlasting arms underneath us to catch us when we fall. Ask the people who were the hapless passengers of those hijacked airplanes as they were hurtling toward the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. No divine hand reached down to save them. Ask the families and friends of the crew on the spacecraft Challenger as it exploded shortly after lift-off in 1986. No protecting diety embraced them. Ask the children, spouses or parents of service personnel during the various Iraqi wars where this supernatural God was when they received the official message from their government which began, “We regret to inform you…” Ask the Jews where the God who could split the Red Sea was when they were being marched into Hitler’s crematoriums during the Holocaust. Ask the children who were born with the HIV virus or the parents of an only child who is killed by a drunk driver. The God that we presume lives above the sky, whose primary vocation is to watch over, guard and protect vulnerable human beings, somehow appears to be frequently off-duty.

The “off-duty God” has given me trouble for some time now. I’ve battled doubts related to all things spiritual for over ten years now and I’ve posted in my previous version of this blog about such things in the past (see Is Anybody out There? and Confessions for a couple of examples.) Sometimes it’s a battle over whether or not an interpretation is correct. Increasingly, it’s a battle over whether or not an idea is true at all.

Yet it’s the questions of “why” or “where was God when…” that continue to haunt me the most. At the risk of sounding like one of my kids, I want to shout “that’s not fair!” The well-known tragedies that Spong mentions are examples we all see, but there are so many more. When a couple loses their only child in an auto accident while he’s on a kindergarten field trip. What good comes of such an event? When a friend’s wife decides life is no longer worth living, leaving him and their two preschool daughters behind. Why do these girls have to grow up without their mother, and wonder what drove her to do such a thing? When a friend loses his dad and a relative says at the funeral that “God had a special job for him and needed him right now.” Really? What about his family? Did they no longer have a need for him? I doubt they would agree.

I wrote about David Bazan’s new album, recently, which is a chronicle of his own journey and the difficulties he has encountered with matters of God and faith. The album closer “In Stitches” contains the following lyric:

When Job asked you the question,
You responded, “Who are you
To challenge your Creator?”
Well if that one part is true,
It makes you sound defensive
Like you had not thought it through
enough to have an answer
or you might have bit off more than you could chew

The answer God gives Job, if you can call it an answer, sounds like “shut up, I’m in charge, and you can’t understand it anyway.” That may be true, but it doesn’t make it or other statements such as “his ways are higher than ours” or “we’ll understand it all by and by” any easier to swallow. Perhaps if he appeared to me in the same manner he supposedly did to Job, it would be. But for now, in this world, at this time, Spong’s suggestion that God is “frequently off-duty” does seem too often true. The definition of God that has him in control of everything is not necessarily comforting when it appears he either isn’t or chooses not to be.

Once again, as I’ve said before, this is not any type of declaration that I have abandoned faith (or that I will at some point in the future.) I’m only thinking out loud, I suppose, and my thoughts are no doubt incomplete. I believe I will be working through these types of things for a very long time, and I’ll likely post more about that journey here.

It’s the way I’m built, I believe; to want things to make more sense. I can’t help it, and when they don’t, it causes me to doubt and/or ask questions. Many things I’ve always believed seem to make less sense as the years go by and I ponder them more and more. In my post two years ago, I asked the question “how do I reconcile what I believe with what I see?” I may never resolve it in a way that will be sufficient in my own eyes, but I suspect I will always be trying to answer that question.