Faith & Doubt Pt. 1 - The Power of Doubt

Every Christian community I’ve been a part of has held a tenuous relationship with doubt. While some certainly allowed more space for doubt than others—usually with extreme caution and very controlled guardrails regarding what could and could not be questioned—doubt didn’t typically hold a high value.

Some communities implied shame with the way they approached teaching characters who doubted in the Bible: Moses’ questions at the burning bush, Barak leaning on Deborah, King Saul’s approach to pretty much everything, the disciple Thomas after the resurrection, etc.

Some took a bait-and-switch approach: doubt was “ok” as long as you landed where they did.

Some portrayed doubt as willing disbelief, or a mindless distraction sent from a cartoonish version of the devil.

More recently, some church leaders have even begun to preach against—I mean manipulate via fear—those who are currently experiencing doubt and faith deconstruction by dismissing them as chasing a fad, or treating them as if they’ve got some kind of spiritual plague. (If only we treated real plagues with the same fervor…le sigh). 

Side note: if you’re thinking “Not my church!?” let me just stop you. 
The entire world really needs churches and Christians to quit using that phrase.
Starting with “Not my church!?” is exactly what perpetuates harmful practices in churches, and breeds environments for darkness to multiply behind closed doors and in the shadow of large pulpits.
So yes. Your church.

In my experience, the consistent message has been clear: 
Doubt is to be downplayed in the face of faith.

“Just have faith. God is in control.”
“When you truly believe, you won’t even need to question.”
“You can doubt…just not THAT.”

No matter the lip service paid from a stage, it seemed that doubt was ultimately designed to be stored in a separate container from faith. 
At the same time, the kind of “faith” that was preached looked a whole lot more like a pursuit of certainty than actual faith.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand the felt need for certainty. Trust me.
As a human, and a pastor, I feel that deeply.

But faith does not imply fact. And that’s ok.

This simple acknowledgment alone would push Christians face-first into humility with every discussion of what we do and don’t believe—or what we are and aren’t sure of—instead of letting our "faith" grant us permission to speak with pride and arrogance. 

Faith is not merely a search for fact, either. 

In my opinion, this strange “we can prove it!” mindset has really only effectively served to make millions of dollars for a handful of theologians, while making millions of regular well-meaning Christians comfortable with twisting the Bible into all sorts of jagged angles, all in an effort to reach some form of irrefutable certainty. 

Again, I get it. 
We want to feel good about what we believe. Confident, even.
Genuine doubt about goodness and God and love and the future can present a chilly, aching pain to deal with. This I know well.
Certainty is a much easier pill to shove, sell, and swallow.

But the library of the Bible wasn’t intended to be used as a science textbook, a history book, a constitution, or a Da Vinci Code novel to keep us scanning for end-times conspiracies. It was collected to give us a glimpse into the heart and potential story of humanity, as well as the heart of God as believed to be revealed in Jesus.

Faith isn’t a set of rules and statements and stories and doctrines to be memorized, like some divine algebraic formula.

Faith is a journey to be lived.

The brilliant, emotionally-intuitive author of Hebrews—whoever she or he was—laid out a simple, profound explanation of faith as being:
assurance built on hope,

and a conviction or decision to take steps toward the unseen. (Hebrews 11:1)

If it’s unseen, if it's hope, it’s not observable fact. 

In this light, the typical evangelical approach to faith (at least as I’ve experienced it) seems more akin to a class full of students who both refuse to show their work, and think it irritatingly pointless to do so:

“Well it works, because the formula says it works, or the way I prefer to read it says it works, and that’s all you really need. Your doubts show you have the  problem, not us.” 

Or in some extreme cases: “I just don’t feel the need to question. That’s what true faith is.”

Is that what strong faith is? Not questioning? Not doubting? Just knowing?

The author of Hebrews understood the struggle within this concept, and followed up their definition by listing some of the more compelling faith “heroes” of ancient Hebrew writings.

Remember: Hebrews was NOT written to 21st century American Christians. It was written to 1st century Jewish Christians who left behind their families, religion, and community to follow the words of Jesus. 

These people were deconstructing their centuries-old faith—some at the cost of their own lives—and weren’t sure it was worth it.

The writer assumed their readers knew these stories. In the original extended versions, nearly all of these heroes waded through serious doubt and difficult questions. 

Take Abraham and Sarah. In their narrative, God prompted them to uproot and move to a new land in order to represent God to the world. In return for their obedience, this nomadic, aging, childless couple would have countless descendants—who would have land and a nation—and "the world would be blessed through them.”

So faithful obedience is what Abe and Sarah had, right? 
Instantly and absolutely: God said it, they believed it, that settled it. Right?

Sure. 

Except for when Abraham was told to leave all his kin behind, and he took his nephew Lot with him anyway.

And that time he lied and insisted that his wife Sarah was his sister to save his own hide in a foreign land.

And maybe when Abraham took their servant Hagar as a sex slave to have a child with because he didn’t believe he could have a child with his wife Sarah.

And then when they shamefully banished Hagar and Ishmael to the wilderness because their decision wasn’t as joy-filled as they imagined, and they figured that was the only way forward.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not seeking to vilify Abraham or Sarah. As someone who recently received very grim news from the fertility doctor, I understand desperation. Not THAT level of desperation, but I get it. (Gotta love Old Testament sexual standards, though.)

We can try to Sunday-schoolify these stories all we want. But if we look closely at the faith journeys of Abraham and Sarah—who would never hold nor see their own story written on parchment, and wouldn’t even experience MOST of their hopes coming to fruition—what do we see?

Certainty? Constant trust? Debates about proof? Heavens no.

We see doubt. Questions. Desperation. Uncertainty. Failures.
Layered upon hope. Anticipation. Possibilities. Improbabilities.

Their story is one big beautiful, horrendous, encouraging, nerve-wracking mess. 

It’s not in their certainty that God meets them. It’s in their doubt.

Heck, Abraham and Sarah couldn't prove a darn thing. If they could, it wouldn't have been faith.

That's WHY we celebrate their faith journey, with all its dips and dives.

When faith is fact, there is no authentic space to experience real disappointment, and true moments of doubt are silly illusions at best. 
Although that kind of faith may seem strong, in practicality it is quite brittle, as it cracks and crumbles at the first sign of difficulty, or when results doesn’t line up as promised. Which often forces its adherents to perform a variety of odd, dissonant, theological acrobatics to explain why.

The scaly side of the faith-as-fact approach is that no matter how righteous or good or godly someone is (or isn’t), or no matter what one does or don’t believe, there will still be times when what should happen doesn’t, and when what shouldn’t happen does. 

Just ask John the Baptist in prison. 
Or ask my female ministry friends who have endured blatant sexism by arrogant male leadership at their (and perhaps your) church in order to be able to serve, lead, and use their gifting and abilities in some capacity.
Or ask any couple who has faced infertility.
Or ask my former students who attend Oxford High school.

It’s in those kind of moments that faith-as-fact struggles to stand.

But...if faith is a journey, as the author of Hebrews suggests, then doubt doesn’t just get a day pass, it holds a permanent place in the process of faith. When genuine doubt is not shunned, but welcomed, faith shows immense strength in its flexibility, not its rigidity.

Doubt doesn't detract from faith. It strengthens it.

Abraham and Sarah doubted publicly and frequently, and their story is still taught and celebrated, messes and all. 

They showed us that you can still move forward while taking your doubts with you.

So to the deconstructing and the doubting folks in my circles, I say this: 
Doubt what you need to, 
question what you need to, 
and ignore anyone who shames you for it, or cautions you against it.
Just keep moving, keep building, and keep looking toward what you don’t see yet, because

Faith doesn’t begin when you stop doubting. 

It begins when you start hoping.

Hoping that what you see now might not be all there is to see.
Hoping that even in pain and sorrow there can be progress and peace.

Hoping that even if you think the church has driven horribly off course, a better way forward could still be found.
Hoping that even in the unknown, good can still exist, love can still act, and new routes can be found.

No matter what you believe, or even what beliefs you've decided to let go, if you are willing to hold doubt in one hand, and hope in the other, you just might be surprised at what could happen when you take a step toward the (yet) unseen that you know is possible.

Who knows, people might even tell your story one day.

From the Love of Jesus - A Christmas Story

It’s amazing the amount of hope that a couple of Christmas gifts can bring.

~~~~~~~

He had only been 9 for a few weeks when he heard the news that they were moving again. It didn’t faze him much. They moved quite a bit after his dad had left them on their own. His mom had little resources and no safety net. Practically everyone they knew was just as poor as them, since GM had nearly crippled the entire city by closing most of the plants. The boy’s mom, a mother of six, had been a housewife all her life. She dropped out of high school to get married, and now that she was over fifty without even a standard diploma to put on a resume, getting a job to support her family would be a tricky feat. Returning to the city was the only way they could hope to afford to survive as they figured out what to do next.

There was one major problem: they didn’t have a place to stay. A family member owned a small, run-down office building in the city, and they were told they could stay in the moldy basement that housed their inventory and broken equipment. It wasn’t exactly livable, but it would cost next to nothing. And the boy’s mom assured him that it was only going to be for a few weeks.

They put up plywood for walls and sectioned off three “rooms” to live in, partitioned away from the scrap metal and mice that filled the musty cellar. Six people crammed into that minute jerry-built living space.

The boy and his mom shared a tiny, windowless room with a concrete floor covered in spare bits of carpet. The ironing board doubled as a dinner table. He didn’t have a bed, so they taped together some cardboard boxes leftover from inventory shipments and place a feather blanket from Goodwill inside as a makeshift mattress. He painted the outside of it with off-brand watercolor paint in attempts to make it look like the race car bed he saw in the Sunday paper advertisements. His mom slept on a cot in the corner of the room, while his sister and her husband and two kids lived in the other two rooms that doubled as storage and a living room.

Few people knew they lived there. To avoid detection and the dreaded CPS, they had to sneak out early in the morning before the office staff arrived, and sneak back in after school. They had to stay silent during the day, and weren’t allowed to go upstairs during work hours. Unfortunately for the children, that’s where the bathroom was. Let’s just say it’s a good thing their pants were washable, because they didn’t always make it in time. And they were probably the only kids on the planet who hated snow days.

The office was in the city school district. But to his mom, that wasn’t really an option. Some cousins lived in the suburbs and offered to let them share their mailing address so the kids would be able to go to the suburb schools instead.

School officials were quick to be suspicious about the boy’s home life, and he was often brought into the office for interrogation. His evasive answers were practiced ahead of time, and never gave them anything substantial, so he was always let go.

He didn’t like lying, but he heard of the terrors that his siblings had faced in the city schools, so he just pretended that he was a spy. Besides, it was only going to be for a few weeks.

But a few weeks turned into a month. Which turned into a few months. Before he knew it, a whole semester had gone by and Christmas was approaching. The day before break, he realized that for the first time in his life, he wasn’t excited about it. If his family couldn’t even afford to live in a real place, how could they have Christmas?

Only one gift topped his list that year: a Real Power Tool Shop. His dad loved woodworking when he was alive, and the boy just knew that if he ever had his own tool shop, he’d probably learn to be just as good. He asked for it half-heartedly, knowing that there was no way it’d happen. He almost didn’t even write it down. $50 was a lot of money, and he didn’t want his mom feeling bad that she couldn’t get it, so he quickly added a couple of toys that he knew were at the dollar store, because at least she could afford those.

Unlike the rest of the world, his family opened presents on Christmas Eve. With the office closed, they could roam around freely upstairs, escaping the mold and dust that made them all cough and sneeze so much. When his mom called everyone into the conference room for gifts, he dragged his feet every step of the way. Slowly rounding the corner into the room, he noticed the usual rows of chairs had been shoved aside, and what he saw in their place made his heart stop and his jaw get rug burns as it crashed to the floor.

The room was completely full of presents. Wall to wall. Big ones, small ones. Presents for all six of them. And there were giant boxes and bags that held even more presents. He tried to count his own gifts, but kept losing track. And the more he looked, the more he found. It was as if picking up one gift made another appear. He couldn’t believe his eyes nor his fingers. And he couldn’t stop shaking, shouting, and hopping. Neither could anyone else. He had so many questions! Who bought them? How did they get there? Where were they from? He searched the labels of his own gifts for clues, but each of his gift tags simply stated,

“To Michael. From the Love of Jesus.”

~~~~~~~

I can’t tell you how many tears I’ve shed while writing this. The people at Panera must think me a basketcase.

There are many seasons and events in my life that I’ve never shared publicly. This is one of them. Until today, only a handful of people know this happened. It will come as a surprise to most of you.

My old friends at Flushing have no idea that I wasn’t even supposed to be there for part of the time we were classmates. We did move to Flushing eventually, but it took us awhile to get there.

That dark time spent living in the basement of an office building in Flint, hiding from CPS, giving false whereabouts to the schools... it’s not really a shining moment for us. Not something we’re proud of. If we only knew then what we know now. But we didn’t. And for all we did know, we were stuck.

So why share it? Because I want you to know just how much of an impact a few Christmas gifts can make on a kid.

If you ask any of us to name an event that spurred the biggest positive change in the trajectory of our family story, all six of us that were crammed into that basement will probably tell you that it was that Christmas.

To this day, I still could tell you nearly every gift I received. I could tell you the order I unwrapped them in. I might even be able to tell you what color the wrapping paper was. But I could never put into words everything that those gifts brought us. I still don’t know where all those gifts came from. Or who gave them all.

They were just simple gifts. Toys, games, books, clothes, candy. But they were so much more than that. Because that night, I went to bed with something that I hadn’t had in a long time.

Hope.

Hope that the way things were, wasn't how it was always going to be. Hope that we weren’t going to be stuck in that dingy basement forever. Hope that good could still come even when life was so off course from where we wanted it to be.
My mom labeled those gifts oh so brilliantly, because even though they were just gifts, each one played a part that night in pointing us back to the kind of hope that comes from only one place:

From the Love of Jesus (Which she STILL writes on all our Christmas gifts)

~~~~~~~

A few nights ago, my niece and her five-year-old son joined me in delivering hundreds of gifts to families in my park. In all, eighteen families received gifts or assistance from people they have never even met. Over the hours it took us to deliver, Tammie and I were met with dozens of hugs, a couple of tears, and even a batch of fresh, authentic tamales still hot from the oven.

In the middle of our stint being Santa’s helpers, we talked about that Christmas in the office, and how much of a highlight it still remains for us. We remarked that in some way, we were joining a crew of other people (some of you who are reading this, even) who just did the same thing for the families in my park that someone did for us so very long ago.

So in a way, this story is a very long thank you letter.

A thank you to the people who helped our family that year in the basement of the office.

And a thank you to those of you who helped by giving your time and your resources to provide gifts, money, coats, food, and car seats to a slew of people you’ve never even met. I’m in awe of you and of God at work in you. THANK YOU. 

Over fifty kids in my neighborhood went to bed this Christmas Eve with empty trees. Each with a different story. Each facing different circumstances. And each still unsure of what they'd find in the morning. And they woke up to find presents filling their living rooms wall-to-wall. All because of you, my friends.

I’m sure that many of them asked the same questions we asked. Who did this? Where did these come from? And even if they might not know the answer now, they will one day. And their parents sure do:

From the Love of Jesus

Merry Christmas, friends.

(By the way…I got my Real Power Tool Set that year. It was wrapped in plain red wrapping paper. And it was the very last gift I opened. I'm pretty sure I cried. I know Mom did.)