How To Move Forward: Embrace The Doubt

From this week's column at MyOneWord.org:

To move forward in a life with God, I have to keep moving forward in my faith. That’s not easy. I’m an optimist by nature, but life many days makes me a skeptic and a cynic. Life makes me doubt. And so my faith comes and goes, ebbing and flowing like the sea I live beside.

I love the ocean, but it scares me—I can’t always see what’s with me when I’m out there. The other night, I dreamt I could see through it, to see the sharks swimming below me. Sharks terrify me. I’m not sure why. I’ve never even seen Jaws. I think it comes from nightmares I had as a kid. Something would pull me into the deep, something I would look for but could never see. My legs would burn, like sliced by knives. Or teeth.

I did triathlons for five months last year. This involved swimming a mile across the channel separating Wilmington from Wrightsville Beach. It was terrifying. I got tired. My arms got heavy. I would remember my childhood nightmare and panic. But I was in the middle of it, with nowhere to go, forever from land on either side, and so my only option was to swim.

Faith is like that. More accurately, fear and doubt and skepticism and cynicism are like that. Faith is the thing that gets us to land. The other stuff is what nearly kills us while we’re out to sea.

To truly know our faith, to know the depth it reaches and the expanse it covers, we’ve got to swim through it. We’ve got to throw ourselves somewhere that we’re not sure we can survive.

To lose my faith, to forsake Christianity—this would throw my whole life into upheaval. But that’s not what keeps me clinging to it. It is what made my doubt so powerful, so profound, but it’s not why I doubt no longer.

The truth is, I still doubt. 

Read the rest here. 

Comments

[Cody]

Always good stuff, keep it coming.

[Brandon]

Thanks bro.