I was reading an article about doubt on the Internet a while ago (as in, about a year ago because that's when I wrote this). It was actually an extremely insightful article. I'll link to it at the end of this post if you are interested in reading it.
If I'm being completely honest with the world, I would have to say that doubt is one of the top things I have struggled with in my life. I not only grapple with it on a spiritual level, but also on a personal and relational level as well. But for the sake of everyone reading this, and myself, I only want to talk about spiritual doubts.
Doubt isn't a topic that's easy to talk about with other Christians. I'm aware that everyone has doubts or has had doubts at some point in their spiritual walk, I can say that with certainty. But there's still a stigma in the church about doubting. You feel like your faith is weaker than others, you feel like others are judging you because of your doubts. I've even encountered some people that have this mindset that doubting will eventually lead to abandoning the Christian life. Unfortunately, sometimes it does, but sometimes it doesn't. I personally think doubting is a really healthy thing for a Christian to grapple with. It challenges you to search for answers, it challenges you to examine your own life and faith, it challenges your view of who God is.
So why am I writing about doubt? Over the past year, I've come to partially realize why I doubt. Probably the most prominent reason why I doubt is because throughout my entire life, right from birth until writing this now, I've known nothing else but Christianity. I grew up with Christian parents. I went to church, Sunday School, and youth every week. I went to bible camp every summer. I even grew up in a very unique area of the world where Christianity was just a regular part of life, a lot of my teachers and classmates identified as Christians as well. My whole life has been saturated with Christianity. Even during my rebellious moments of middle school, high school, and young adulthood, I've always had this incredibly clear voice in the back of my mind distinguishing what was biblical and what wasn't.
Now let me ask you this: did you notice how I only talked about Christianity, and not about God? That's because I grew up with a general idea of who God was (more like what God does), and it took me until after I stepped out into the world on my own to discover that my idea of God was flawed. I could put my relationship with Him and knowledge of Him in a box and label it "Christianity".
Here's the number one thing I've learned about God over the past four years: He doesn't like being in a box. Boxes are confining and limiting. Have you ever tried putting something in a box that doesn't fit in it? I have. When I was packing last spring, I stuffed a blanket and some sheets into a box and taped it up. Almost immediately the box ripped open from the pressure because it couldn't contain how much was in it. God is too big for my box.
Most of the time boxes are used for storing things we hardly use. I have a boxes of stuff in my room full of sentimental things that I only peruse every couple years. God is too important to just be something that we take out of a box and tinker around with on a Sunday morning, Thursday night, or one week during the summer.
The whole boxes topic was on my mind constantly last spring, around Easter. And I realized something interesting. God doesn't like being put in a box, but He put Himself in one for us. The human body could be considered a type of box, a type of confinement. This big, huge, all-powerful, all-knowing, supernatural being put Himself in a tiny little body that needed to remember to eat, sleep, use the washroom, and could only travel so far in a day. Talk about confining! The apostle Paul addressed this concept in Philippians, writing "Though he [Christ Jesus] was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal's death on a cross" (2:6-8 NLT).
Not only did He lower Himself to life as a human, He also experienced death as a human. He boxed Himself in a human body, and then He boxed Himself into a human grave. But do you remember what I had mentioned earlier about my box of blankets and sheets? My box couldn't hold them in.
And the grave couldn't hold in Jesus.
So what exactly am I trying to say? My idea of God was that He was something I could stuff into a confining space and because of this, I viewed God as small. Too small to handle any big thing in my life, like BIG doubts. But this is something I have now experienced as blatantly false. God is too big and important for my box, but my doubts and questions aren't too big for Him.
Until next time,
Jay
Here's the article I mentioned:
What to Do When Wrestling with Doubt
