Wednesday
Nov082006
thoughts on doubt
Wednesday, November 8, 2006 at 02:21PM
I wrote this piece Sunday afternoon and have debated posting it. I sent it to a couple of my mentor-type friends and was surprsed by their reaction. They were thrilled and excited by the honesty of my struggle. Their joy has been a great encouragement to me, and is working against the very issue at hand. I’ve got more thoughts that have come since, but I’ll share them in the next few days. For now….
My parents have attended the same church for a little over 30 years. I grew up as a part of that church and it was a steady part of me until I left town after high school. For the most part, this was a really good thing. When I got to college I bounced around a bit, but if I wasn’t “going� to a particular church I was “looking�, because being a part of a church was always a part of me.
There were some fights in my house when I started learning guitar and listening to Pink Floyd, but I was a good kid. Despite feeling rock and roll coarsing through my veins, I never rebelled. Didn’t have a need or desire.
And now, and for probably the past two years, there’s a fighter in the ring and he’s pointing at me and calling me out. He’s probably the most feared, and least talked about, fighter there is: doubt.
The whispers from the attic have turned into roars in the living room and, I won’t lie, they’ve left me more than a little shaken.
***
I got really into theology after my one gloriously fulfilling year of college. All the cool, old books people quote from? I read ‘em. Calvin, Luther, Lewis, Grudem, Packer, Piper, etc… The baseball cards of Christian thinking. And I loved it. I was inspired and on fire. I wrote an album called Coming to Life and I meant every word of it.
But as time went on, deals went South and theology turned into a formula. “If A then B.� My beliefs started turning into brass knuckles, and if you didn’t know the right gang signs (you know, using words like “covenant� and “election� and turning up your nose at Chris Tomlin and Sonicflood) then I’d beat you with my knowledge until you limped away. Because it was the only way to keep feeling it.
***
Today at church we had communion. Randy, our pastor, told us that when we got to the front we’d put out our hands and they’d serve us the bread and wine, or we could cross our hands to our shoulders and someone would come and pray with us.
I crossed my hands. Someone came and prayed for me.
He prayed wonderful things, that I would know that God was real and that He really loved me. That I would look to Him and not the idols of control or money or sex. He prayed that what I would believe in my heart what I believe in my head.
And that’s when it hit me. For me, I need that prayer the other way around. I need what I believe in my heart to inform my head.
***
The problem with seeing your theology as a series of logical steps is that you start to tear apart the premises. When you get to evil and faith and the garden of Eden and Noah’s ark, the logical side starts to go “hey, what about this over here? It’s kind of weird and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.� Once you start questioning those things the idea that God sent His son to take the penalty for our sins, the basic belief of Christianity, starts to shift around a bit.
It’s like a house in California that slowly slides down the side of the mountain. A foot down and you start to notice, and by the time you’ve asked for help you’re halfway to the water below.
And here I am. I’m 27, I’m married, I’m 4th and inches from having two kids. I own a home and through some supreme act of providence have kept up with the mortgage. I work in the nursery every fifth Sunday (cheap, I know) and I make a living playing mainly Christian music, as much as I hate to admit it.
Now is a terrible time to start doubting.
I’ve written a song for the new Caedmon’s record about this. I’m going to go ahead and assume here that I’m not the only that’s been to this place. If so, the song will be really lame, since every verse starts out with “maybe you’re like me…� Anyway, it’s about how we’ve lost the freedom to wrestle with doubt, to actually enter into it in hopes that we’ll come out stronger on the other side. Our responsibilities and our image keep us from rolling back our sleeves, muttering “this is going to suck� and jumping in the ring.
***
I know I’ve planted some of the seeds of this doubt myself. It’s inherent in us all, I think, but it’s also in the different books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen. Interestingly, I don’t think music has played to this. Music, by pretty much anybody, is a recipe for believing in the unseen. At least for me. But anyway, now that those seeds are there I feel like I have three options.
Option 1. I can let the seeds turn into weeds that change the whole place. I can give into the doubt and hope my family and friends don’t all leave me.
Option 2. I can try to pull the weeds out by reading different books and different movies. A little Chesterton can go a long way, but pulling weeds never keeps them from growing back.
Option 3. I can keep asking Jesus to forgive me, to be real to me and to rip the doubt out at the roots. I don’t think it’s just more devotionals and prayer. I’ve never stopped those things, though they’ve slowed down. It’s that I need Jesus and I don’t know how long He’s going to wait to answer me.
***
We call it “going through the motions� when people feel like this but act like everything’s great and nothing bothers us. We look down on that.
And this is me not doing that. If I want my faith to be real and if I believe that Jesus is real, then I need to be real.
It means I cross my arms and ask for prayer while everybody else is taking communion, even if a bunch of Caedmon’s fans see it and it weirds them out. It means I tell my neighborhood small group the same thing I feel I do every week: “you can keep praying for me and all this doubt I can’t seem to shake.� It means I don’t lie to my wife when she asks what’s bothering me.
But again, that’s hard to do. I want to be a good dad and a good husband and I don’t want to lead people away from Jesus. Even if I have a hard time feeling it, I believe Jesus is real. Or at least I want to. And I want my kids to, and my wife, and my friends, and you reading this.
Because I’ve seen people changed by Jesus. Not lying tv preachers or R. Kelly’s gospel album, but my friends Randall and Mitch. I’ve seen believers in India who had literally nothing but huts and oppression and who believed, not in a superstition, but in a God who changed them completely. I’ve seen it be real, so why is it so hard to believe?
My parents have attended the same church for a little over 30 years. I grew up as a part of that church and it was a steady part of me until I left town after high school. For the most part, this was a really good thing. When I got to college I bounced around a bit, but if I wasn’t “going� to a particular church I was “looking�, because being a part of a church was always a part of me.
There were some fights in my house when I started learning guitar and listening to Pink Floyd, but I was a good kid. Despite feeling rock and roll coarsing through my veins, I never rebelled. Didn’t have a need or desire.
And now, and for probably the past two years, there’s a fighter in the ring and he’s pointing at me and calling me out. He’s probably the most feared, and least talked about, fighter there is: doubt.
The whispers from the attic have turned into roars in the living room and, I won’t lie, they’ve left me more than a little shaken.
***
I got really into theology after my one gloriously fulfilling year of college. All the cool, old books people quote from? I read ‘em. Calvin, Luther, Lewis, Grudem, Packer, Piper, etc… The baseball cards of Christian thinking. And I loved it. I was inspired and on fire. I wrote an album called Coming to Life and I meant every word of it.
But as time went on, deals went South and theology turned into a formula. “If A then B.� My beliefs started turning into brass knuckles, and if you didn’t know the right gang signs (you know, using words like “covenant� and “election� and turning up your nose at Chris Tomlin and Sonicflood) then I’d beat you with my knowledge until you limped away. Because it was the only way to keep feeling it.
***
Today at church we had communion. Randy, our pastor, told us that when we got to the front we’d put out our hands and they’d serve us the bread and wine, or we could cross our hands to our shoulders and someone would come and pray with us.
I crossed my hands. Someone came and prayed for me.
He prayed wonderful things, that I would know that God was real and that He really loved me. That I would look to Him and not the idols of control or money or sex. He prayed that what I would believe in my heart what I believe in my head.
And that’s when it hit me. For me, I need that prayer the other way around. I need what I believe in my heart to inform my head.
***
The problem with seeing your theology as a series of logical steps is that you start to tear apart the premises. When you get to evil and faith and the garden of Eden and Noah’s ark, the logical side starts to go “hey, what about this over here? It’s kind of weird and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.� Once you start questioning those things the idea that God sent His son to take the penalty for our sins, the basic belief of Christianity, starts to shift around a bit.
It’s like a house in California that slowly slides down the side of the mountain. A foot down and you start to notice, and by the time you’ve asked for help you’re halfway to the water below.
And here I am. I’m 27, I’m married, I’m 4th and inches from having two kids. I own a home and through some supreme act of providence have kept up with the mortgage. I work in the nursery every fifth Sunday (cheap, I know) and I make a living playing mainly Christian music, as much as I hate to admit it.
Now is a terrible time to start doubting.
I’ve written a song for the new Caedmon’s record about this. I’m going to go ahead and assume here that I’m not the only that’s been to this place. If so, the song will be really lame, since every verse starts out with “maybe you’re like me…� Anyway, it’s about how we’ve lost the freedom to wrestle with doubt, to actually enter into it in hopes that we’ll come out stronger on the other side. Our responsibilities and our image keep us from rolling back our sleeves, muttering “this is going to suck� and jumping in the ring.
***
I know I’ve planted some of the seeds of this doubt myself. It’s inherent in us all, I think, but it’s also in the different books I’ve read and movies I’ve seen. Interestingly, I don’t think music has played to this. Music, by pretty much anybody, is a recipe for believing in the unseen. At least for me. But anyway, now that those seeds are there I feel like I have three options.
Option 1. I can let the seeds turn into weeds that change the whole place. I can give into the doubt and hope my family and friends don’t all leave me.
Option 2. I can try to pull the weeds out by reading different books and different movies. A little Chesterton can go a long way, but pulling weeds never keeps them from growing back.
Option 3. I can keep asking Jesus to forgive me, to be real to me and to rip the doubt out at the roots. I don’t think it’s just more devotionals and prayer. I’ve never stopped those things, though they’ve slowed down. It’s that I need Jesus and I don’t know how long He’s going to wait to answer me.
***
We call it “going through the motions� when people feel like this but act like everything’s great and nothing bothers us. We look down on that.
And this is me not doing that. If I want my faith to be real and if I believe that Jesus is real, then I need to be real.
It means I cross my arms and ask for prayer while everybody else is taking communion, even if a bunch of Caedmon’s fans see it and it weirds them out. It means I tell my neighborhood small group the same thing I feel I do every week: “you can keep praying for me and all this doubt I can’t seem to shake.� It means I don’t lie to my wife when she asks what’s bothering me.
But again, that’s hard to do. I want to be a good dad and a good husband and I don’t want to lead people away from Jesus. Even if I have a hard time feeling it, I believe Jesus is real. Or at least I want to. And I want my kids to, and my wife, and my friends, and you reading this.
Because I’ve seen people changed by Jesus. Not lying tv preachers or R. Kelly’s gospel album, but my friends Randall and Mitch. I’ve seen believers in India who had literally nothing but huts and oppression and who believed, not in a superstition, but in a God who changed them completely. I’ve seen it be real, so why is it so hard to believe?
