Day 50
Without A Doubt
I wonder if Porpoise ever worry about stuff like, “I’ve got a hankering for fresh herring. I hope there’s some around at dinner time tonight” or “I wonder if the weather is going to be nice enough tomorrow to swim north to see my friends?” I doubt it.
Do you have doubts about God, the Bible, God the Father, Jesus Christ, The Holy Spirit, Christians or the Christian faith? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of the above then, Welcome! You’ve just passed the first universal requirement for legitimate membership into our pod.
Jesus was surrounded by disbelief. This was a very important issue in His earthly ministry. It still is today. One of the problems with mainstream Christianity today is that we have attempted to eliminate any room for doubt or doubters in our professions of belief. One author characterizes our effort as an attempt to achieve “a bombproof certainty, a state of faith where all our beliefs are at rest, where everything is proven logically, where there is no dynamic tension, where everything is clear and clean and unwrinkled and in its place, like pressed shirts in a suitcase.”[i] If your pressed shirts look anything like mine after a flight from L.A. to New York well, you get the point.
We’ve developed phrases in our society that indicate our disdain for doubt and doubters. Some of these include, “Are you sure about that? Absolutely! I have no doubt whatsoever. No doubt about it. There’s no doubt in my mind.” Eyewitness testimony in criminal cases has been determined by experts to be inaccurate approximately fifty percent of the time.[ii] Since 1976, for every seven executions, one death row inmate has been exonerated.[iii] If you happen to know or be one of these Christians who say you have no doubt whatsoever about our faith, you’re not human, in denial and you need to get some. Maybe it’s time to embrace some holy doubt. As one author says, “sometimes doubt is actually holy — when it reveals a desire to pursue the truth, even when doing so means revising one’s current beliefs?”[iv] There’s no such thing in the Christian life as a faith without doubt.
My friend Stan is an attorney. Well, he’s really a child of God disguised as an attorney. He handles cases that most people wouldn’t touch. He uses those opportunities to share his faith with people who most people deliberately avoid.
Stan and his wife became friends with a poverty stricken family in the barrio in southern California. Why? “because we fell in love with them.” At fifteen years old the mother, Lilly, swam across the Rio Grande by herself with her sister holding onto her back. She married and had seven children over the years. The family lives in very cramped quarters. They even rented a closet out to a guy once. It was really great to have him because he set up a TV in his closet that the kids watched when he was out. Lilly has worked jobs as a cook in a tortillaria, various restaurants, a factory, picking strawberries, and a health clinic. Stan and his wife became part of the family. They took the kids places, enjoyed meals together, celebrated holidays and birthdays together, provided financial support and supplied tons of food over a period of years. Stan and his wife don’t have any children and treated Lilly’s children as their own.
I was talking with Stan over a cup of coffee early one evening when his cell phone rang. “What? Oh no! Oh No!” Lilly’s fourteen-year-old son Dominic had been arrested and charged with aggravated first-degree murder and an additional charge of special circumstances (gang related activity that could elevate the matter to being tried as an adult and the possibility of a death penalty sentence). Stunned, Stan wandered into the night.
During the months that followed, I had numerous conversations with Stan about this shocking turn of events. “Dominic…I can’t believe it! If there was one of those kids that I had a special affection for, it was Dominic. He was always polite, well mannered and considerate. There was absolutely no doubt whatsoever in my mind that this kid was the best of the bunch, the one who was destined to make something of himself. I was one hundred percent certain about it.”
Although events like this shatter the faith of most people, Stan is a realist filled with faith. He visits Dominic in jail awaiting trial, not as his attorney (which he is not), simply as his friend. Stan has demonstrated for me that, “The cure for doubt isn’t certainty, it’s commitment.”[v] Oftentimes, it is through observing the lives of others around me that God exposes the gray areas where my faith is required to grow. When He reveals doubt and uncertainty to me, I embrace them today as opportunities to learn from the God of More. They’re rarely comfortable, convenient or predictable. As one author says, “Faith means striking out, with no clear end in sight and perhaps even no clear view of the next step.”[vi] I don’t view doubt as a weakness anymore. Neither should you. “Faith involves admitting with humility and boldness that we need to change, to go against the flow, to be different, to face and shine the light on our cherished illusions and prejudices, and to discover new truths that can be liberating even though they may be difficult for the ego, painful to the pride.”[vii]
The words of Jesus need to be heard by the world today as he shouts, “Do you believe this?”[viii] To respond that you are without a doubt as you learn to live the Christian life is like attempting to learn to skate without falling. “Do you know what happens to people who set about learning to skate with a determination to get no falls? They fall as often as the rest of us, and they cannot skate in the end.”[ix]
NOTES
[i] McLaren, Brian D. More Ready Than You Realize – Evangelism As a Dance in the Postmodern Matrix, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI. © Copyright 2002 by Brian D. McLaren p. 131.
[ii] http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dorf/20010516.html
[iii] http://speakout.com/activism/issue_briefs/1231b-1.html
[iv] McLaren, Brian D. More Ready Than You Realize – Evangelism As a Dance in the Postmodern Matrix, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI. © Copyright 2002 by Brian D. McLaren p. 50.
[v] Rogat Loeb, Paul. Soul of a Citizen-Living with Conviction in a Cynical Time, St. Martin’s Griffin, NY Ó Copyright 1999 by Paul Rogat Loeb p. 261.
[vi] Yancey, Philip Reaching For The Invisible God – What Can We Expect To Find, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, MI © Copyright 2000 by Zondervan, p. 47.
[vii] McLaren, Brian D. Finding Faith – A Self-Discovery Guide for your Spiritual Quest, Zondervan Grand Rapids, MI © Copyright 2003 by Brian D. McLaren pp.13-14.
[viii] John 11:25
[ix] Lewis, C.S. The Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis, Family Christian Press & Wm B. Erdman’s Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Mi. Inspirational Press Edition, A Division of BBS Publishing Corp. © 2004 p.118
