There isn’t a nasty thing to be said about Christianity or the Bible or God that would shock or offend me. I’d even agree with a lot of it.
There isn’t a single doubt that someone could express that I don’t share, at least a little bit.
There’s not an aspersion to cast at God that I haven’t already cast myself.
I mean, how can a reasonable person with a news app in this day and age not question the existence and goodness of God? If He is real and He is good, then why is the world such a dumpster fire?
How can a reasonable person not question the Christian faith when those who claim Christianity the most loudly are the ones flinging the most flaming garbage?
What kind of benevolent creator makes a creation with such propensity to go off the ever-loving rails? What kind of loving God doesn’t intervene?
Why doesn’t He fix this?
Or at least save some children? Something, anything?
If you think God, or at least the God of Christianity and the Bible, is either a lie or a hateful tyrant or a deadbeat dad, I get it.
Or if you think the church sucks and does far more harm in the world than good, I get it, I get it, I get it.
I get it so much, I want to hug you and fist bump you and take you to coffee to talk about it all day.
And yet—it’s the strangest thing.
My stubborn belief is never more clear to me than when I hear someone else say aloud the things I say in my head all the time, the things I just wrote. Or when I read someone else’s venomously angry poem that skewers the same religious beliefs and behaviors I oppose. Or when I watch a reel where someone, very rightfully so, rips Christianity a new one and recants their faith for reasons I agree with.
It’s when I come face to face with another’s disbelief that I realize how deep my own belief actually runs.
I feel the same things, have the same questions, am filled with the same anger.
Yet.
I stop at a line they cross.
Sometimes, there’s about one step between me and total rejection of the Christian faith. About one step between me and atheism. I hear the comment, read the post, watch the reel, and I understand why this other person has taken that last step from believing to not.
But I can’t take that final step.
Something holds me back.
And it’s not any religious purity or piety on my part, mind you. I am not sitting here in any kind of judgment, like I’m holding fast and those across the line from me are wayward.
Far from it.
I don’t feel superior for staying on this side of the faith others have rejected, as if it’s some merit or willpower of mine that keeps me here.
I don’t feel afraid to cross the line either—though I’ll admit the thought does make me deeply, deeply sad.
It honestly just doesn’t feel like a choice I make.
It’s just that, when I get to that final step, I run out of rope.
Whatever it is that tethers me to God is taut.
Something holds me in this belief that my brain and my worn out nervous system so desperately try to reject.
Something holds me—
The love of Christ.1
The Spirit burning in my chest and knowing deeper than I can know.2
Or straight up delusion.
It’s hard to say.
But I’m pretty sure that it’s Christ and the Spirit holding me here.
Can you shake your fist at heaven or blame your God above
If He allows the weakness to prove the strength of love?
I would let Him go, but He won't let go of me.
I understand why people throw the Jesus baby out with the evangelical bathwater.
I have no answer to offer the friend, the angry poet, the deconstructed exvangelical influencer.
I just know that I want to stay here with Jesus.
I understand how the questions, the grief, the anger pull someone away from Him.
And yet—it’s the strangest thing.
For me, it’s like the questions and grief and anger are part of why I haven’t stopped believing.
The less I try to deny or explain away my questions, the less I try to bypass my grief, the more honest I am about my anger—the more real and precious Jesus seems to be to me.
I don’t understand.
But the more I give in to that not understanding, the more I believe.
I don’t understand, but I’m learning to believe.
The Andy Squyres lyric “I don’t understand, but I’m learning to believe” makes more sense to me than all the apologetics, more sense than any defense of belief I’ve ever read.
So I spelled it out in plastic letters, and it’s spent the past three years on my wall, always ready to offend my intellectual sensibilities in favor of something like faith.
It’s the strangest thing.
I spent years in pews with my doubts and my tears and felt so utterly alone.
And now it feels like doubt is in vogue.
#deconstruction is always trending.
My generation is leaving the church and leaving the faith all together in droves.
And I get it, I get it, I get it.
Yet.
Here I am, unable to cross that line, not even wanting to.
Somehow, all these years that I’ve been shaking my fists at God, somehow I’ve ended up grabbing ahold of Him. Or at least the fringes of His cloak.
I have a headful of doubts. And a heartful of grief. And a little handful of Jesus that keeps me hanging in here on the side of a belief that I can neither defend nor explain.
It just keeps hanging on to me.
In the age of doubt all that’s left for us to do is believe.
Andy Squyres “Jeff Buckley”
And I just believe.
Or I’m learning to.
Lately I have felt like I don’t exactly know where I am. My surroundings are deep in the wild. I continue to travel to places I’ve never seen or been before. Curious, observing. A continued awakening.
My faith in Jesus is wild. It is deeper than the roots of all the trees and wild things that surround me. Just as mysterious and unseen the deep roots of these forest trees are around me, my faith runs deep. I am unexplainably grounded in Love.
We are walking, and struggling, on the same path! Love you Natalie!