Day 5 - God, Can We Chat?

“Joyful is the person who finds wisdom, the one who gains understanding.” (Proverbs 3:13, NLT)

“Anyone who listens to my teaching and follows it is wise, like a person who builds a house on solid rock.” (Matthew 7:24, NLT)

Discovering that we can be simultaneously lost and found, certain and uncertain, trusting and skeptical, faith filled and faith drained, believing and doubting, and a hundred other mysterious paradoxes has set my faith free more than anything else since the day I said, “Yes, Jesus, I’d love to be your friend. Thanks.” Doubt has given my faith a new lease on life just when I thought it was fading. The question I’ve decided to say a resounding “yes” to is this: Am I willing to trade certainty in God for intimacy with him? My question to you is the same.

But why, Niki? I hear you ask. Why do I need to trade? Can’t I have both?

Unfortunately not. Certainty is unobtainable. Yes, we can feel certain in our beliefs, but not in knowing God’s ways, thinking, and nature. And if we’re not careful—as I’ve discovered to my faith’s detriment—our constant quest for certainty can eventually rob us of our closeness with God. Giving up that quest is an act of spiritual survival.

Increasingly we hear the world telling us to “discover your truth” and “live your truth.” At the same time, prominent faith leaders fight back and tell us there’s only one truth, and if we are to be true believers we must know it, believe it, and live it. But everything in me wants to scream, “I hear you, and I want to. But I can’t! I have too many unanswerable questions!” Trading certainty for mystery has, quite honestly, been a relief.

The peace I’ve discovered in my questions has taken me back to the heady days of my new faith in that Victorian church with its bare brick walls. Stripped of its plasterwork and ornate molding, our faith becomes more genuine, refreshing, and welcoming. Like Pete Greig says, we will discover how “time and time again, God ignores [our] most pressing questions in order to answer the deepest longing of [our] heart.”^a

No one picks a devotional like this if they don’t love their faith. You didn’t read this far because you want to throw in the towel. Quite the opposite. So let me encourage you: When we dare to doubt, we find the rest Jesus promised for the weary and heavy-laden. When we dare to doubt, we discover that our Father, who has known and loved us all along, is waiting, his arms thrown wide in welcome. Finally, we can take a breath. We are wholly loved, doubts and all. We can relax, knowing our faith isn’t coming apart but coming together. And we can make peace with the knowledge that on this side of heaven we’ll always carry a few questions.

Augustine was right: God made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until we rest in him.^b And for those of us who’ve assumed rest will come when our questions are answered, we can finally exhale.

Coming to God in our uncertainty, when nothing makes sense, is a step toward the life of abundance, freedom, and rest he longs for us to accept. It’s an act of trust when trusting him is the last thing we think we can or want to do. Chatting to God in the midst of our doubts is our way of saying, “I don’t get it, God, but I want to know and be with you more than I want answers. So I’m willing to be willing to show up in the mystery. Let’s do this.” We, like Rachel Held Evans, will be able to say, “I am a Christian because the story of Jesus is still the story I’m willing to risk being wrong about.”^c

How do we live in mystery without imploding or living life frustrated—or worse, walking away from God? How do we become comfortable holding doubt and faith together and being okay with it? How do we turn our doubts from being our faith’s kryptonite to its superpower? We keep moving, keep talking, keep listening, keep staying open, curious, willing, and full of love—in relationship with God and others.

As you go, may your daring honesty with God continue. As you walk with him in the gloriously freeing and frustratingly endless mystery of faith, may your chats bring you into the untold treasures of his closeness, one doubt at a time.

Take a moment to read this blessing over yourself:

May we, the believers, doubters, skeptics—

doubting believers and believing doubters—

along with the disillusioned, frustrated,

and spiritually curious, forever seek as those who will find,

and be found as those who keep seeking.

And may you who dare to doubt

know that I, along with a great cloud of witnesses—

Esther, Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Mary, Martha,

Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen,

Susanna Wesley, and Mother Teresa, to name but a few—

are praying and interceding on your behalf.