wants us to wrestle with Him, to fight for Him, to grapple
with the Mystery, to hold on tight and refuse to let go.
The more I read the Bible, the more I am convinced
that God has empathy for our situation. I
don’t think our doubts offend God. But I do
think He is concerned when we swallow our
doubt, when we pretend He is not beyond
our understanding and when we attempt to
hide our true feelings from Him (as if we ever
could!).
So how do we let doubt be a fire that refines faith rather than consumes it? In my own
experience, the following four principles have
been extremely helpful.
The author of Ecclesiastes claims “I have seen the burden
God has laid on the human race. He has made everything
beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human
heart; yet no one can fathom what God has
done from beginning to end.”
The Bible is wonderfully candid when it
refers to this incredibly good news (that we
bear something of the eternal right at the deep-est part of who we are) as a burden. The truth
is, if we flesh-and-bone, finite creatures really
do house something infinite, we can expect to
feel at odds with ourselves a good deal of the
time. Accepting that tension can go a long way
toward helping us do something constructive
with our doubt.
Many Christians
expect a doubt-free
walk with God.
When trouble comes,
we must contend
with not only the
questions themselves
but also with the
stress and shame
at having the
questions at all
Expect Some Turbulence
The other day I grabbed a cup of water from the
kitchen table. It turned out it was not my water
but my daughter’s lemonade. I like lemonade, but the tart
flavour was so unexpected I did a classic cartoon “spit-take.”
Expectations are powerful.
Many Christians expect a doubt-free walk with God.
When trouble comes, we must contend with not only the questions themselves but also with the stress and shame at having
the questions at all. Our panic will be significantly minimized
if we understand that the majority of believers who have
gone before us (from biblical heroes and Early Church
Fathers to more recent saints
like Henri Nouwen and even
Mother Teresa) have encountered seasons of doubt.
I suspect a great number of Christians discover as
they journey with God that
the more they believe (the
more they perceive of God)
the more doubt springs up as
a natural response to the gap
between what is and what is
understood.
To have real faith – faith
that hopes for things that are
not yet seen – we have to be
confronted at least occasionally with a keen and painful
awareness of just how unseen
some of those things are. That
awareness often manifests itself as doubt.
Reading With Doubt
• Disappointment With God
by Philip Yancey (
HarperCol-lins/Zondervan, 1988)
• Reaching for the Invisible
God by Philip Yancey (
Harp-erCollins/Zondervan, 2000)
• The Myth of Certainty by
Daniel Taylor (InterVarsity,
2006 [1986])
• When God Interrupts by M.
Craig Barnes (InterVarsity,
2006)
• God in the Dark by Os Guinness (Crossway, 1996)
• The Gospel According to Job
by Mike Mason (Crossway,
2002)
• Walking Away From Faith by
Ruth A. Tucker (InterVarsity,
2006)
• Doubting by Alister McGrath
(InterVarsity, 2007)
Don’t Forget to Remember
Every time I hold a friend’s new baby, I’m
shocked by how much I’ve forgotten about my own kids’
infancies. When they were tiny, I thought every precious (and
not-so-precious) detail would be etched in my mind forever.
Now I can barely recall what they looked like back then. If
we don’t actively remember things – by writing them down,
taking pictures, and telling and retelling stories about them
– we forget.
You’d think it would be easy to remember our spiritual
epiphanies – answered prayers, Holy Spirit insights and
touches of God through circumstances or special perceptions
of His presence. In reality, spiritual encounters are particularly difficult to recall precisely because they belong to another
realm that seems to vaporize when we get bogged down in our
material existence.
The Old Testament prophets understood this problem.
They had a habit of marking milestone moments with rocks
and altars (they called them ebenezers) so that later, when
it all seemed like a hazy dream, they could go back and
touch something tangible and remember what God had
done for them.
It is critical that we do the same. Journal. Write a song.
Tell a friend. Take a picture. Read the stories of other believers
as a way of accessing the collective memory of the Church.
Memorize Scripture. Remember.
Focus on the Who Question
Slowly, I am coming to accept the fact that if God is really
God, and I’m really not God, it only makes sense that there
are aspects of Him that are beyond me. This awareness allows
me to see mysteries that once threatened my faith as actual
grounds for belief.
At the same time, there is much that God has chosen
to reveal about Himself – through creation, through His
