Doubt.
"Doubt hangs its hat on all Christians. None can honestly say they've escaped it” - Mark Littleton
"Doubt does not mean denial or negation. Doubt only means swaying and staggering between Yes and No. It is only an uncertainty” - Karl Barth
“Doubt is not unbelief. Unbelief is rebellion against evidence that we cannot or will not accept. Doubt is stumbling over a stone that we do not understand. Unbelief is kicking at a stone that we understand all too well” - Elmer L. Towns
“Doubt is not primarily a Christian problem, but a human problem . . . . The root of doubt is not in our faith but in our humanness.” - Os Guinness
"Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God Himself” - Madeleine L’Engle
People talk about it in hushed tones; they worry that it might be contagious, and worry that their reputation will be damaged irreparably if anyone knows that they’ve got it. And it’s very boring when an outbreak hits you. For me, doubt usually comes when I’m in an atmosphere of great certainty, like one of those boisterous celebration meetings where, if you’re careful, you can end up with a nasal rebore from a low flying flag. You know the feeling – the bloke next to you is head butting a tambourine with a monotonous rhythm that is causing you to have fantasies about killing him. The lady sitting in front of you is so ecstatic about being a Christian that she has had her hands raised high in the air in praise throughout the whole meeting, including during twenty minutes of numbing notices. The cheery leader on the platform is gushing breathy platitudes into the microphone: “Don’t you feel the Lord is in this place. He is here!” The woman in front of you stretches out and positively touches the ceiling with her worshipping fingernails, the bloke next to you is gnawing his tambourine now with a rabid enthusiasm, and you sigh, crushed for the moment by the burden of believing. Is all this God-stuff true? Is anyone out there beyond the canvas of this tent/plaster of this ceiling?
The other time when I get mugged by doubt is when flying. Actually, as I write this, I am seated right now in the innards of a rather large British Airways jet, which is aimed at America. I shall shortly be dispensing large chunks of biblical teaching to some assorted gatherings of rather nice Christian people. I am right now hurtling through the sky at 500 mph, my trajectory carefully navigated by computers, enabling Nigel the pilot to announce the time of our projected touchdown to within a minute or two, even though we are still three thousand miles from our destination.
But the laws of physics and the precision genius of computer chips do not govern my emotional and spiritual condition. At this moment, I feel less certain about my own ability to do anything useful for Jesus. I’m not sure who I doubt more – Him or me. Today, while wrestling with a rather bland salad at 36,000 feet, I found myself looking around the cabin and becoming increasingly unsettled about my faith, just as a result of surveying the backs of the heads of my fellow passengers. What is it that they do to cause this spiritual nervous tick to erupt in me? Simple. They unnerve me because of their normality. They sit and nurse their plastic cups and appear to have no concerns about holiness or morality, about the meaning and purpose of life or the life exploding eruption that breaks upon a soul when it discovers that there is a Creator alive and well at the heart of the universe – and One who wants to know me. I see no signs of fretfulness on their faces because of the niggling impotence of the church that professes Christ’s Name so boldly but witnesses to His life so pathetically. No, they just sit there, living another day without apparent depth or significance, mesmerised by just existing, and for a moment, I envy them, and feel that to believe all of the time is too much like hard work. And then I begin to really worry about myself in my secret, scandalous envy. My jealousy is truly wicked. Why, I am carrying in my bag a black, leather bound book that apparently announces that these people are lost, and are themselves tiptoeing inch by inch into the black hole of a lost eternity. I berate myself: do I believe this enough to do something about it? Am I truly convinced that these nice, pleasant people, who apparently were made from a different gene pool from the serial killers and concentration camp guards of this earth – are they really so lost? Round and round the confused, fearful thoughts tumble, and for a while I feel more lost than they. And some of them shake their plastic cups with annoyance, because their ice is melting. And I shake my head in vain, hoping to dispel some of the ether inside my skull, but it persists, and, for a good while, God seems a long way off at 36,000 feet up. The plane zooms effortlessly forward, a precision dart on course for its destination. But the cabin seems filled with fog as I reach for my laptop, and begin to write this ‘Going Deeper’ piece. A few moments reflection will cause me to know that, actually, to live life for nothing, to merely survive, is no blessing, but a true curse. But in a tired, and the even mildly depressed condition that long plane flights seems to create in me, I feel battered by waves of uncertainty and disorientation.
Doubt. Well, there’s no magic conclusion here, no slick recipe to banish doubt for good. Just the realization that we all suffer from it once in a while. One day, we’ll see Jesus, face to face, and life in the twilight zone of believing will be over - forever. In the meantime, we live on the spiritual dark side of the moon, His face sometimes made distant and blurred by flesh, by life, by busyness, by fear. Resurrection will bring face-to-face revelation, and what a joy that will be. In the meantime, if we sometimes doubt, it doesn’t make us grade “C” Christians, or mighty pagans.
It just means that we’re not dead yet.