Doubt

It's 2:30 in the morning and I’m a far cry from falling asleep. I have tons of questions swirling through my brain, like the debris caught in the winds of a tornado; they circle round and round in my mind, cluttering my thoughts, and showing few signs of clarity. These questions always seem to circle around the foundations of my faith—my belief in God and my belief in grace; but mainly my strong tendency to doubt both of these things.

It’s difficult for me to publicly admit my doubt, as I recognize it is a taboo topic. I’ve always identified with Thomas the Disciple (more commonly known as “Doubting Thomas”) for this reason, and have always felt an understanding pang of sympathy whenever I hear his story. I connect with the story of Thomas because, in so many ways, it is my own story. When it comes down to believing in a carved-out, humanized sculpture of what God supposedly looks like—his existence, his character, his rules, or his presence in the world—I cannot simply gaze upon it in awe and wonder and accept it as truth. No, I have to dig deeper than what can be seen on the surface; I have to ask questions, consider new possibilities, and sink my fingers into the bloody wounds to know—without a shadow of a doubt—that they’re the real thing.


There is a strong disconnect between my head and my gut concerning my faith. My gut-feeling has always convinced me that there is a God, that there is salvation, that there is grace, and that there is love, and that somehow these things are intertwined. The gut-feeling has very little logic to back up its ideas and convictions, but it somehow gives me reason to have faith. It is this gut-feeling that has sustained me through the worst situations in life and has kept me believing, even when it seemed like the sensible thing to just throw in the towel and walk away from the whole mess of Christianity. This gut-feeling has motivated me to get out of bed on the days I felt I had no rhyme or reason for being here, and it has pushed me to put one foot in front of the other when I’ve had absolutely no courage to move on my own. I have been told by many people that I’m a strong individual, and that every human being has an enormous capacity to live and to deal with the pain life dishes out from time to time. But my gut-feeling knows better; it knows that someone is holding me together when I can’t muster the strength to do it on my own (which is more often than not).

My head, on the other hand—the “thinking” side of me—doubts God nearly every minute of every day. Yes, there are days when I even doubt God’s existence. I look at the world around me as it struggles to maintain its very survival and I have to wonder, where can God be found in this mess? It’s as though the human race is trapped under water, struggling for air to fill its lungs, and there is no one there to pull it to the surface. But beyond this doubt, there lies another doubt that plagues my mind more than the first: Is my faith the one, true faith? I have done my share of traveling over the past few years and I have met many people of different religions; good people, within whom I have seen an authenticity and kindness that I have not always witnessed within the Christian culture. To these people, their faith is true; their faith gets them up every morning; their faith sustains them through the hard times in life and it gives them hope. I look at these people and I often wonder, how can I possibly know my faith is the one, true faith when these people believe in their god more than I sometimes believe in mine? I hear their fervent prayers and their grateful praises to the objects of their faith, and I have to wonder, does God turn a deaf ear to their cries? Will he condemn them to hell, even though they’re doing the best they know how to do, and steadfastly believing in what they were taught to believe?

These are the questions I ask myself every night as I lay awake in bed, trying to turn off the light in my mind and fall asleep. I don’t know the answers to these questions, and I don’t know if I’ll ever know. The only thing I can trust is this feeling in my gut, because it’s the only thing I have to cling to. I can hardly call it concrete or understandable, and this bothers me more than I can articulate. But who knows? Maybe God doesn’t always reside within the intellectual and the tangible; maybe he resides in the imagination, in the mundane, and in the gut-feelings that allow me to just know.