Doubts & Faith

In their own unique ways, each of my children have wrestled with Christianity.

Sometimes that struggle may have stemmed from overzealous teachers presenting the faith as a fire escape from hell-fire and brimstone, which is not found in my own beliefs but is admittedly and frequently found in the beliefs of many Christians.  

At other times, their questions may have emanated from the intersection of science and faith:  do they reconcile or conflict?  To those who live in media res, they reconcile; but to those who live on the ends of the spectrum, they conflict.  All too often, the "Christian" view gets presented (or better but, "misre-presented") by the conservatives who fear God's rejection if they get anything wrong.  It's also possible that the "scientific" view may be presented by some with an axe to grind.

And then again, at other times, the kids' struggles may have found root in the friction that they saw in my own relationship and interaction with Linda.  I'm really sorry for that, and I wish I could have sorted out how to fix it . . . or at least to live out a better example.

No matter the source from which seeds of doubt sprouted, I'm glad they did.  I really do believe that a person's faith is not really their faith until they've doubted it enough to challenge it.  And sometimes that period of challenge takes a long time.  That's okay in my book.

Oswald Chambers put it this way in the October 31st reading:

God frequently has to knock the bottom out of your experience . . . to get you in direct contact with Himself.  God wants you to understand that it is a life of faith, not a life of emotional enjoyment of His blessings.  Faith by its very nature must be tested and tried.  And the real trial of faith is not that we find it difficult to trust God, but that God's character must be proven as trustworthy in our own minds.  Faith being worked out into reality must experience [some] times of unbroken isolation.

I've experienced just that.  My doubts came a little later in life -- starting in law school, where I was first taught how to think, not just what to think.   And, over a lifetime, dark periods have challenged me with doubts that test faith.   In hindsight, the doubts and dark times have often yielded to glorious sunshine -- light spreading out in fresh new ways across the entire color spectrum.  Faith, it seems, is a lifelong and then eternal exploration of the magnificent, the wondrous, the indescribable.   It's not that I yearn to go through more doubts and dark times -- not at all.  But those times have always eventually led to deeper, more joyful experiences of faith and the overwhelming feeling of experiencing the love of God in "no matter what" types of circumstances.

I knew -- when we moved to large cities, when we moved to metro-DC, when we chose the educational tracks that we chose, when we sought to balance the secular and sacred in ways that I didn't know as a child -- I knew that you would learn how to think, not just what to think.  That freedom is important, I think, for you will experience it at some point in life anyway.  I knew then that you would encounter your own doubts.  That's okay.  God loves you more than you can imagine and just as you are.  And, if your experience has any similarity at all to mine, you will continuously wake up into the knowledge of that love and the concomitant belief that he will somehow make all things new.  The good news of the gospel will be just that -- good news.  Better, in fact, than we ever imagined.