Faith, hope and… doubt
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.
