I should be working. Not writing. There is a difference, sometimes. I have several deadlines for other people coming up. And I’m trying to take a trip at the end of this week. And I’m trying to publish a book.

But here I am, writing about something I’d sworn needed to hit the backburner for a few months—again. At least until I got the book behind me.

I can’t stop thinking about it, though. Not today. Like this book, it consumes me. Probably because my doubt does, too.

I was lying in bed tonight, the lights all off. The television off. Nothing but me and my thoughts. Sometimes that’s dangerous. But not in a dangerous way. Dangerous because it wreaks havoc, has me thinking things like I’m thinking now.

What if Christianity is just another religion?

Who’s to say it’s not?

I had those thoughts, and that’s when I realized: The Lighthouse Project isn’t about other people. It’s not about the people I write about, but I already knew that. I thought it was about other people, people who were where I “used to be.” Doubting. Questioning. Debating. Wrestling. But it’s no longer where I “used to be,” because it’s where I am again.

It’s a strange dance, this dance of faith and doubt. Some theorize that the two are necessary for each other. If you don’t doubt, then how can you truly have faith? I don’t like that notion, though. Faith is something more than trusting something you can’t see. Faith is having the guts to dare to look, to see if what you can’t see is there at all.

Faith is having the guts to stand in the batter’s box, believing in your training. Doubt does nothing for you there. To say doubt is a good thing is to say fear wins. I know this, because I often stood in that batter’s box with doubt in my mind, and I went from a pro prospect to a fourth-string bullpen catcher. There’s more to it than that, but it’s irrelevant, because it could have all been prevented had I shoved out doubt.

But I kept doubt in. And doubt did me in.

Where has my doubt come from? I say my own mind, but that’s not entirely true. My doubt began when I started reading other things. And who’s to say those things are more true than the truth I once believed with all my heart? But now my heart is shared between God and questions.

I’ll never be agnostic. Never wholeheartedly. I’m not even borderline skeptic. As loaded as the term’s become with so much insidious baggage, I’ll be a Christian always. Because I love Jesus, and I love God, and something in me, something bigger than whatever fear or doubt I have, knows God’s there.

But this damn doubt slows me down, and I have too much to do in this life to be slowed down.

I just learned that The Lighthouse Project isn’t me being a lighthouse. My parents had plaques for all our names when I was a kid. Mine, Brandon, was subtitled, “Light on a Beacon Hill.” Or, Lighthouse. I’ve always liked lighthouses. I always felt I was meant to be one.

But tonight I realized: I need them. Because I’m not a lighthouse. I’m a ship in the sea, and the sun’s just gone down. Or maybe it’s about to come up. It’s always darkest before the dawn, isn’t that how the cliché goes?

Whatever the case, The Lighthouse Project is me, the ship called Searching, seeking lighthouses. I search for the good things in this world. I search for hope, for love, for inspiration, for things worth living for. I search for these things in other people, in others’ stories. I search for light, but only because something in me knows its there, and that it’s something more than human. If human is there is to believe in, then there’s no need for faith. If human is all to hope for, then there is no hope.

Not to say to be human is not to be beautiful. To be human is to be a mirror. I look for those reflecting light. Reflecting love. Reflecting Love. Reflecting God.

I search because in such a broken world, those reflections are beautiful gifts. And gifts have to be given by someone.