Journeying with our Doubts

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For the longest time, I used to think that 'faith' was something that naive people clung to in an attempt to ignore reality. When people would tell me that they were trusting God even though they didn't have the answers, I would think, there goes another simple-minded person who is ignoring logic, rationale and progressive thought.

If something in my own life seemed to indicate that God didn't care, that He wasn't who He said He was, I would become convinced that those circumstances and the resulting line of thought had discounted the validity of God's goodness. I saw those niggles of uncertainty as signposts that I was falling for a lie: the Bible couldn't be taken literally. God was not ready to act on my behalf and He didn't really care.

In reality, those thoughts were just doubts.

I struggled with doubts about myself, about God and His word, about life and those around me. At times, I called my doubt 'critical thinking' and was certain that I had found holes in the faith and in what God had said in His word. Don't get me wrong. I was a Christian. I believed in God. I believed in the Bible. But I believed it only up until the point that I could get my head around it. Which would be fine, if I always had a clear grasp on things and was smarter than God. But, I wasn't.

I'm still not.

At first I thought I was in control. I thought that I was structuring my universe and that my critical thinking and the 'instinctive' interpretation of my circumstances would point me to truth and wholeness. Instead, I found that the more real estate I gave these interpretations, the more unsettled and confused I became. The harder it became to believe anything that God said and eventually, all I could hear was fear. I wasn't sure what I believed any more. So I ran. From church and what I had been told and from God. Thankfully, God is a chaser. But the period in my life was dramatic to say the least, a wild navigation into what I actually believed, and at that stage, it wasn't much. I knew God was real. That was a no-brainer. I sensed that He loved me (although I couldn't correlate it with the things I had experienced in my life), but I couldn't go much further than that. As I sifted through all I had been told, all I had been taught, I became an empty slate. I railed against God and I couldn't stomach anything with a remotely 'christian' message. I was up to my eyeballs in teaching and needed truth.

It was a long process. One marked with real transparency as I peeled back the layers of who I was and what I believed. In that experience, God met me and I was blown away by who He actually was, as opposed to who I had thought or been taught He was. The doubts had chewed away the crud. They chewed away some of the good stuff, too, but God restored it.

Out of that (necessary) experience, I learned a vital truth: I learned to recognise that doubts are just doubts; they are not truth. My doubts couldn't discount God's reality, no matter how elaborate, how deeply grounded or how legitimate those doubts felt to me. God either is or He isn't. And if He exists, then He is who He says He is. I can trust it.

So how do we handle our doubts? Do we stuff them all into a box and deny their existence, their legitimacy?

No. We are all on a necessary journey. A journey for truth and God will meet it. But there is an approach that we can take that is healthy and positive and one that will bring more confusion and fear.

In the book of Hosea, God lamented that the Israelites did not 'direct their deeds toward Him' (Hosea 5:4) but instead, turned from Him and looked to their idols for answers. When we see the word 'idols' in the Bible we often think of wooden totems and fail to see the relevancy to our current society, but an idol is anything that we allow to speak to us in such a way that it negates what God has said to be true, be it a painful experience, a popular opinion or intellectual thought. A person.

As I was reading this scripture, I felt the Lord saying; there is nothing wrong with having doubts. It is okay to question, to be scared or confused or angry or lost. God does not disapprove of the raw emotions of His children any more than I disapprove when my children communicate their hurts, questions or complaints about things that happen to them. God met me in my pain. The problem sets in when we use our doubts to distance ourselves from God rather than taking (or directing) them to Him. Don't get me wrong, God pursues, but we can avoid a lot of the pain by taking our issues to God, rather than running with them.

Raw emotion and doubt are part of the human condition. We can expect them, as God does. But when we give our doubts control; when we make the decision that they will be our litmus, our measure for truth, we have alienated ourselves from reality. God exists and He loves, whether we can wrap our mortal minds around it or not.

Know your teams.
Doubt isn't truth.
Doubt is just doubt.