THOUGHTS on FAITH

THOUGHTS on FAITH

Hopefully these excerpts from some of my journals will stimulate conversation about finding faith. At the time, I thought I was having a faith-crisis. Growing up in a Christian home, being a pastor’s wife and worship leader, facing this reality was difficult. I was angry. I was desperate. I had been wrestling with certain issues of my faith and religious system for too long. I had a million questions and I had run out of answers…
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Have I been asking the wrong questions? What is wrong with me? I believe in all of the fundamentals. I know most of the right answers. Or do I? Why aren’t they working for me now? 25 years of biblical knowledge and Christian cliché wasn’t substantial for this emptiness in the pit of my stomach. Church and worship services were disorienting and torturous- a two hour reminder of my mental agony. Who is going to understand how I’m feeling? Who can I talk to? Other Christians are going to think I am ‘losing my faith’. Why did I feel like I couldn’t talk about it? It was a scary, lonely place. I was going to have to dig deep within myself and start over. It was hard to admit that somewhere along the way I had acquired some bad habits, along with the good ones. A lot of the pat answers that I had were actually quite superficial and arrogant. Having an answer made me feel safe, like I was…okay…and that my beliefs were okay.

Erwin McManus said in a message Reaching Postmoderns:
“Every human being is created by God to try to make sense of life. We’re always going to be asking the question ‘why’. Here’s the problem: Christians are seen as people afraid of questions. Have you noticed that? ‘We’re the people with the answers! We’re so smart!’ You ask the question; I have the answer. Most of us when we get on television or radio debates, were answering the questions and they’re asking them. Here’s a little tip: Who ever is asking the question, that’s who is open-minded. The person who’s answering the question, that’s who is closed-minded. And if you read Jesus, he asked a lot more questions than he gave answers. In fact, maybe the great skill that we need to learn in this search for meaning is: how to ask questions until a person comes face to face with truth.”

Hearing this, God asked me a question: “Are you okay with not being okay?” And the truth that I encountered that day was that I had believed that I was the one who was responsible for making myself okay (and finding all the answers). The truth: I’m not okay. And that’s okay with God. He wasn’t afraid of my questions or doubt, only I was.

After dismantling my belief system, I was ready to reassemble with truth. I started researching with fresh eyes. I read books, articles and blogs; sought out advice from pastors and authors across the country. I formed honest relationships with people in my community who were not attending a church, and listened to their story of finding faith. Sadly, they all said the same thing: They believed there was a God, and they even believed in Jesus. But Christians didn’t act anything like Jesus and it discouraged them in their search for God. They found strange superstitions and formulas that added more expectations to their life than they could keep up with. Hmmm…the same things that I had been feeling. How typical was this? After much reflection and conversation, I realized I was not having a faith crisis at all! I was experiencing an uncomfortable shift in my thinking. A shift in the way I viewed the Christian faith, God, the Church. The more that I stopped worrying what “Christians” might have thought about me, the more I shared my story, and the more others became open to sharing theirs. Isn’t it amazing to find that the very faith I thought I was losing was the exact substance that was leading me to re-discovering it? It was not about eliminating my wavering doubt, rather it validated that faith transcends shifting structures. God lives inside of us, in spite of our doubt and confusion.

I love what Rob Bell says in his intro to the book Velvet Elvis-Repainting the Christian Faith: “Times change. God doesn’t, but times do. We learn to grow, and the world around us shifts, and the Christian faith is alive only when it is listening, morphing, innovating, letting go of whatever has gotten in the way of Jesus and embracing whatever will help us be more and more the people God wants us to be.”

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I am reminded of the story of a Jewish leader named Nicodemus. He and Jesus were having a conversation about faith. Jesus told Nicodemus that for him to fully understand what true faith in God was, he had to be reborn and see the world through the eyes of a child.

“How can anyone,” said Nicodemus, “be born who has already been born and grown up? You can’t re-enter your mother’s womb and be born again.” -Gospel of John

Obviously Jesus was talking about spiritual re-birth, but it isn’t an easy concept for us to get: to be reborn. To us, to become child-like seems almost childish. In our ‘mature’ eyes, don’t we view that as weakness? And yet at the same time, isn’t it a liberating concept?

We all have a story. Your questions are different than mine. Although we will all find faith in different ways, we all have the same intrinsic needs. We all share the same fears, longings and cravings for something beyond ourselves. We don’t have to try to figure this out on our own. I encourage you to be the kind of humble person that can offer your story to help someone along their journey. The beauty of faith is that we will always be rediscovering it.

“If you’re going through that kind of intellectual pain {doubt} right now, lay it before God. The kind of dependence on God that you are exercising now, in the midst of intellectual uncertainty and confusion, may be the purest kind of faith found on planet earth. It involves an act of will and courage that I think must be far more valuable than we normally realize. It may even be heroic…. After all, to trust our beliefs about God more than we trust God- wouldn’t that be missing the point?” -Brian McLaren

Book recommendations:

A New Kind Of Christian: Brian McLaren
Unchristian: David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons
The Shack: William P. Young
Adventures In Missing The Point: Brian McLaren and Tony Compollo
The Gospels of Jesus
Jesus Wants to Save Christians: Rob Bell
A Generous Orthodoxy: Brian McLaren

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