Redeeming doubt
A personal account of facing my deepest doubt
Recently, I wrote a piece in which I described how stories help Christians understand the God they serve. Christians cling tightly to the bible because they love the God it reveals to them. The God of the bible can be confusing at times, but I believe that the person who approaches the bible with patience and an open mind might walk away with a good question about who God is.
It’s common for people to want to have all the answers. I am no different. But it is not possible to have every answer, not by any means available to an individual human. This bothered me for a long time, until I started to understand the true value of a thoughtful question and how it opens the door.
Stories of redemption is a frame I have drawn around how I approach the gospel of Jesus Christ. I am so often obsessed with the details of my life that I forget to step back and — for lack of a better phrase — see the bigger picture. I might not have every answer, but I can at least know what the world is moving towards. God’s ultimate purpose for the world we know today is redemption.
Redemption is a purposeful act. Contemplating all the reasons why God has chosen to redeem me helps me understand how I can be part of that story in someone else’s life. But the life of contemplation and stoic thought cannot be meaningful without corresponding action. This is why I have decided to share how God has redeemed my darkest doubt. It all starts with a question.
Have you ever been afraid of asking a question? I have been captive to that anxiety. There were myriad reasons why I would hold a question in, all rooted in fear: fear of being called dumb or ignorant; fear of being found out as a fraud; fear of being unable to understand the answer. The most intractable fear was revealing that I had doubts. There is no defining moment I can point to as the origin of this belief, but sometime in my life I came to think of questioning my religion as a sinful doubt. I think it is likely due in part to a misunderstanding of the book of James. The church culture I was part of didn’t appear to have many doubters, so I believed that there was something wrong with me. Untruth upon untruth, I crafted a mental prison out of the restrictions I imagined a pure religion demanded. I felt the need to hide my doubt from everyone, including myself. I started to believe my own lie: that I was truly convinced that Jesus is real and alive and not dead in a cave. The lie meant that every unasked question only fueled internalized shame.
This repression colored my perspective of God. Instead of an approachable father, I saw him as a distant arbiter of cosmic justice. How dare I question an omniscient being, as if he should have to explain anything to me? Yet I was angry that God did not make himself known to me. Christians point to the bible as though it has all the answers, but I was too afraid to admit that it didn’t make sense to me. How could ancient texts — the newest being about 2000 years old — offer any insight into the modern questions of today? Surely, I thought, the world now is so vastly different and so exponentially more complex that the only real value the bible offered was a moral history of the Jewish and Christian religions. There was no way I could pick the book up, read it, and hear from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
Late 2014, I began ruminating my doubts. For the first time, I vocalized them to a trusted spiritual leader who lovingly encouraged me to dig deep and search. I don’t know how to describe my response.
Did I refuse to put forth the effort I would need to expend? I know I used to think it would take a lot of work to go about finding answers to questions I had. I let them build up inside me. Spiritual health is not a debt to be cancelled. The soul collects.
Was I simply blind, not made to see? At this point, no one knows but God. I knew some spiritual truths but I was choosing to shed them from my personality. I learned to express my doubts with people who I trusted would understand me. Slowly and deliberately, I began deconstructing the faith I started to admit felt like a falsehood.
What I didn’t expect was how lost I would feel without a spiritual connection. Embracing doubt became my identity. No longer was I burdened with the thoughts of an afterlife that no one knows anything about. No hell could scare me back into the fake faith I had decided to abandon. No heaven was worth arbitrary rules and the eventual guilt I knew I would feel over breaking them. Yet I was aimless and without purpose.
Is it all so meaningless?
Why suffer anything, I wondered, if there’s no order to our days? I was more free than I had ever felt in my life, but it did not offer me insight into the ultimate question: the one that began at my very birth.
Who am I?
I am Michael. My name is a question: who is like God? To introduce myself is to pose that rhetorical query. Who I am seems to be intrinsically tied to the answer to that question.
No one is like God. There is no one who is righteous and just, absolutely not. I looked at the state I was in and could only see destruction. The question hung over me like a curse, condemning my world to be nothing more than endless pain and suffering.
Why would I want to live in a world like that?
If I could never know what God is like, then the only freedom possible would be to take back the authority I had tried to surrender to him in my Christian walk. And so I continued on in my life, fully immersed in the knowledge of my self as an unbeliever. I vocalized denial of the resurrection. “Surely no one has ever come back from the dead,” I dared to say. I still felt like a fraud making such a claim, but it was something I felt I had to say out loud. It was the final nail in the coffin I used to bury the young Michael who played at religion.
I didn’t avoid all existential thought. Even the most outspoken atheists claim to know something about God; it’s only natural for humans to consider the classical God amidst archetypal philosophies. I decided I didn’t want to know anything about gods or anything supernatural. Agnostic deism and agnostic theism became terms I used to communicate my new understanding of the world. I would readily admit that since humans are so small in the universe, it’s impossible to know anything beyond what we can see and hear and touch.
The absolution I felt from thinking and saying these things was, I think, good for me in the long term. It was like opening a spigot that had rusted shut. I could finally vent my doubts and explore them objectively and without the emotional baggage I’d carried silently for years. But I still harbored some resentment within me toward Christians and their faith.
It might have been jealousy from all the years I longed to be a true believer but never felt genuine. Some theologians might say I hated God because I was reprobate. I don’t know if I hated God, but perhaps God can be a better judge of that. Regardless the fruit of my resentment, the root was my pride. Though I had accepted the reality that I am likely never to know as fact the true nature of the universe and its existence, I still chose to believe that Christians were entirely wrong.
No one can know God. That was my answer to the question.
It was pride which kept me from seeing the sovereign hand of a God who is alive and cares for his children. God intervenes in my life every day and I am largely blind to it. Even now, looking back on the months that have passed since I repented of my disbelief, I am seeing how God was present in ways I did not expect.
Are there other ways to answer that cursed question?
Who is like God?
The Sunday school answer works. I deigned to admit it: of course Jesus is “like God,” according to Christians. He is God to them. But the more I thought about it, the more Jesus as a character seemed to understand the world with a clarity I have never considered. Even if I didn’t want to believe, I had to admit that the stories about him were compelling. His insight into how humans operate looked like something I hadn’t seen before.
I started to search for something. I didn’t know what it looked like or even what it was, but I had an unsettled question and I needed to do something about it. I set about to systematically understand my journey. Keeping a journal seemed like a practice I could adopt: I imposed no restrictions on myself since I have failed at recording journals before. I felt impressed upon me the need to write every valuable thought down.
The entries into that journal were for my eyes only. I wanted total freedom to write down whatever thought was in my mind, and writing to an audience other than myself seemed like a bad way to meet my yet-to-be-defined goal. I took liberty with my language in those pages in describing myself and the things I was seeing in the world around me. A few weeks of writing helped me shape what I wanted to know: what is the truth about Jesus?
And then something happened.
Stories I had written about my days were forming into a larger metanarrative. I thought my subconscious was implanting details throughout my records, creating accidental patterns which seemed to reveal a bit more of my true character. What I saw in myself was ugly. I didn’t want it.
There was a curious code that defined most meaningful relationships in my life. I always assumed that someday I wouldn’t need anyone. I owed nothing to others unless they first gave something to me. What I thought I wanted was independence. All I was truly getting was isolation.
Disgusted with the reality of my selfishness, I sat down and weighed out what this meant for me. If I didn’t like what I saw in myself, could I change it? It wasn’t as though this was the first time I understood my own nature. I reflected on the times in my past when I had claimed salvation from my sin, but if I was still so unchanged, then from what had I been saved?
My face on the ground, I knew I needed help. I asked a friend to pray for me. The weight of my pride crushing my spirit, this friend laid his hands on me and prayed. I don’t remember his words. What I clearly recall was his call to action afterward.
“Choose to believe,” he said.
I knew what he meant. I was long past hiding my doubt with him. When he spoke those words, it was the clearest I had seen the hand of Jesus — extended toward me while the trackless sea sent countless waves to capsize me.
Could I believe the resurrection? Could I even entertain the thought?
Where would I even begin to make that decision?
What I have since learned about that day is that God has always been the one to begin: I was simply ready to trust him to show me the way.
To encourage you, dear reader, and to help you understand the emotions I felt in this process of my doubt, I ask that you spend a few minutes here to listen to the song “A Prayer,” by Kings Kaleidoscope. I’m almost finished with my story; please watch this before continuing to the end.
I love this performance. The artists allow the question to hang in the air unanswered: “Jesus, where are you?” Waiting in the silence was where I finally faced my doubt by asking the question I was afraid to ask.
In seeking God, I thought I had only found my end.
But God… began something new. He answered my question. It just took me a while to hear it.
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved.” (Ephesians 2:4–5)
What I have come to know about the day I was encouraged to choose to believe is this: Jesus walks beside me in a way he promised to believers over millennia. He is alive today and he will live on. I am saved by the gift of grace through his death and resurrection.
I choose to trust Jesus’ hand has hold of mine, though the waves of doubt overwhelm and death surrounds me.
I’m right beside you
I feel what you feel
And I’m here to hold you
When death is too real
You know, I died, too
I was terrified
I gave myself for you
I was crucified
Because I love you
I love you, child
I love you
Because Jesus loved me first, I can choose to respond to him in belief, love, praise, and selflessness. Dear reader, that is a glorious freedom. What I have learned from processing my darkest doubt is that it is okay to feel hopeless. Having no hope does not mean I no longer believe. It seems so simple to say it now, but it is only by believing that I can learn to hope.
God met me in my doubt and disbelief. He stirred up in me the desire to seek him and he has shown his faithfulness by revealing himself through his promises. I found those promises in what Christians call the word of God. The trust I am learning to put in God’s promises has become precious to me. Gratefulness for the bible nurtures a daily routine of writing, reading, thinking, and praying. There is wisdom to be gleaned from the bible, if only I would take the time to try to find it. As I sought wisdom despite my doubt, I started to see its consequences within the pages of my journal. I can see the work of redemption in my life.
Who is like God? Now that I understand who he is, I have no better answer than Jesus.
