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Responses (sorted by date)
clrclady: Confession (8/28/10)
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(I post this blog, of my very personal and admitted agonized thoughts on doubt with a lot of prayer and humility. It is not my desire for my struggles with faith and doubt to be a stumbling block unto anyone. I live with these struggles daily and felt a need to share them. Please be gentle with your responses but respond if you feel led to. I love you all, my church family. Thank you for accepting this wayward soul into your church. MW)
I was asked at lunch today who or what I worshipped. The question was asked sincerely, and in the same spirit I responded that I worshipped whatever there might be outside knowledge. I worship the void. The mystery. And the ability of our human minds to perceive an unanswerable mystery. To reduce such a thing to simplistic names is an insult to it, and to our intelligence.
-Roger Ebert
I think the sweetest poison one can drink in this world is also the most dangerous. The poison called certainly. To KNOW anything absolutely is to be proven a fool. We cannot know, we can guess, speculate, hypothesize, have faith in or hope for things but we cannot know.
I’ve spent the better part of my adult life on a search for truth, for knowledge. I have done this first as a Christian then as a agnostic and now,,,,,, well what in the hell am I anyway? What label works? What words can I use to categorize where I am at on this road?
I grew up knowing there was a God. I knew that Jesus was my friend and he died for my sins, I knew that bad people went to hell. I knew that atheists were missing out on these wonderful truths. I knew that God had a special purpose for my life then a few doctrinal doubts, some life experiences and a car crash later I found out I didn’t know anything.
Then I spent 10 years in the vast wilderness we call uncertainty. Doubt, skepticism in it’s truest form. I argued with both the Christians who claimed to have some secret knowledge about God and the atheists who thought such pursuits were fruitless. I read near death experience literature by the boatload, I read philosophy and the myths of other religions. If there was one thing that I was sure of it was simply that we did not know anything.
And then a few months ago, for reasons that are not completely clear to me I decided to give faith another try. I called on God, even yet still full of doubt and confusion and asked him to use me if he could. And I find myself in this place that I am at now. I still don’t really know what to call it, or if it really has a name at all.
I have faith and yet I have many many doubts. I think this would seem a contradiction to many but the opposite of doubt isn’t faith it’s certainty. I have no certainty but I do have faith I do have hope.
It’s interesting to see what motivates people to believe. I know some Christians who believe because they’ve experienced their prayers being answered. This creates for a slippery slope sometimes though what if God decides not to answer your prayers in the way that you hope or even worse EXPECT him to? Would be easy to lose faith in faith if God seemed to be less than caring? If he didn’t provide you with your desires and needs?
Still others believe in God for their get out of jail free card. Because God will keep them from having to go to hell. This is Pascal’s wager in a nutshell. It’s safer to believe in a God rather than not to believe in one because the consequences are that much greater for unbelief if there is a God then they are for belief if there isn’t one. I wonder, if I were God(which I am not) how I would feel about these people who only believed in me so that I would protect them from their punishment? Is this truly some people’s only motivator towards faith?
I don’t believe in God for either of those two reasons. It’s not some great reward or some horrible punishment that motivates my faith even in the midst of my doubts. I believe because it makes sense to. Because the work of the kingdom is something that has been put upon my heart Because the character of God is something that I can align myself with. Because the idea that there is someone in control of all of this chaos is comforting to me. because I believe in the power of God to not save everything and everyone from future destruction, but to restore creation back to it’s original intention. My belief and faith has very little to do with the life to come. I still have many problems with the idea of supernatural things. I’ve never seen anyone truly healed, I’ve never been healed of anything myself. Life is still messy whether you believe or not.
I sometimes wish that God would come down from heaven and meet me somewhere and just sit with me and explain things to me. I wish I could be Moses for a season and just have God to speak to. I wish that prayer was less about me babbling on and on about whatever and more about God making it clear to me how this world really works. I wish he could tell me why things happened the way they did, the good and the bad. Why he either planned for, or allowed my brother to die the way he did knowing what that would do to me. I wish I could get a glimpse of eternity so that all of my fear would fade away. I wish God would touch me take away my pain and my sadness, I wish that I truly
believed without any doubt.
Sadly, for whatever reason, God doesn’t work that way and I am left with what I have. A shaky faith and a heart and mind flooded with doubt and I’m left to walk this road, in a very real sense, all by myself. I wish there were words that would truly capture the agonizing pain my doubt has caused. I don’t think anyone really understands. So I walk my road and do my best to try to hear God’s quiet voice over the noise of the world. and I pray that someday, even though I am wretched and imperfect and broken and hideous, when it is all said and done, if there is life after this. I hope that Jesus will look upon me, smile and say “well done good and faithful servant”.
Until then I’ll just hope. | 
