Doubt

An unlikely spiritual gift

Doubt.

I’ve been reading this week about John the Baptist, and it has comforted me. I hope that it comforts you, too. Here I am in my Third Act, reading about Jesus’ cousin, the prophet, who had the misfortune of enraging Trump Herod by pointing out the sinful relationship between him and Herodias, his latest wife, his own brother’s widow-by-way-of-Herod-killing-him. Outraged, feelings hurt, Herod sends ICE soldiers and imprisons the Baptizer for speaking truth.

Photo by Jaspreet Kalsi on Unsplash Mustard seed

Cast into a tomb-like cell, John has nothing but time to reflect on his life and ministry. He knows the story of his own miraculous birth, and of Cousin Jesus’. Surely, the family lore is embroidered with stories about the magi, the shepherds, Jesus’s encounter with Anna and Simeon, and with the bewildered teachers at the temple when Mary and Joseph accidentally left him age 12. He knows all of that. He has devoted his life to preparing the way for his cousin, who he has known would be the Messiah. He has followed God into the wilderness and lived like a wild man. He innovates a new expression of faith: baptism, a ritual done to one person by another. He has done his part in preparing the way. Yet now in adulthood, in this dump of a prison, he doubts.

Now when John heard in prison what the Christ was doing, he sent a message through his disciples and asked him, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” Matthew 11:2-4¹

Maybe I’m reading this wrong. Maybe I’m projecting. Maybe it was more of a dare, like he was trying to out Jesus as Messiah before Jesus was ready, “Yo, Cuz, are you gonna overthrow this sinful half-Jew Herod and get me out of this rathole prison or not?”, or sending his disciples to encourage them—”if you don’t believe me, ask Jesus yourself: is he, or isn’t he, the Messiah?”

But I think not. Discouraged, tired out, beat up, starved, and (unbeknownst to him) about to have his head literally served up on a platter, he doubts. So John takes his doubts to Cousin Jesus and asks:

What if I’m wrong?

You won’t find it in the list of spiritual gifts in Romans 12 or 1 Corinthians 12, but I think I may have the spiritual gift of Doubt.

I prayed to receive Jesus with my eyes open when I was five years old, then flayed out my foot (fight or flight kicked in during the total immersion baptism, for which no one prepared me how it went) when my head was unceremoniously slammed underwater, and nobody gave me time to hold my nose. Thus, to my 5-year-old self, I was never completely “fully immersed”. Spent lots of my childhood listening to how the rapture was coming and some of us would get left behind. There was a song, a movie, and everything. Suspected it was me, that I was the goat not the sheep, because I didn’t shut my eyes to pray and let my foot stick out of the water. Waited, terrified, when I got home from school and no one was in the house.

For a decade I begged and pleaded for Jehovah Rapha, the “God who healeth me”, to heal my sister from an incurable disease—the first of many He did not heal when I begged him to. Told occasionally that it was an issue of my faith [or possibly my open eyes and unimmersed foot], not God’s impotence. My small, microscopic faith.

Trusted him to bring someone I love to faith in him. Nope. 40 years later, still begging. Still, nope.

Trusted him to return first one, and then another, then others back to faith. Nuh-uh. Negatory.

I have done battle, spiritual battle, as each of these scenes rained torrents of doubts upon me. I’ve wrestled, and won, and grown in understanding, and peace, and joy, even. The Lord God has met me in these lonely, heartbreaking places, and carried me (sometimes dragged me), and buoyed me up in tidal waves of doubt and grief. I have triumphed often against doubt.

But it is a big creature.

Recently a new one has surfaced, because I am entering a time where friends I love are dying with increasing frequency of—natural causes. Old age. I find myself occasionally thinking about…being dead. Not existing. Nothingness.

And it’s creepy.

What if, doubt whispers, what if it really is all made up? What if you close your eyes, your brain stops telling your heart to beat, and you really do just turn into compost? [my spiritual gift of mercy prohibits me from going on my rant about how John Lenon’s “Imagine” is the stupidest song ever written. You should thank God for that, whether you believe he exists or not.]

Now don’t panic.

This is not me saying, “and so I’ve left it all behind, it’s all made up and I recant my faith in God.”

I cannot do so. Because I have encountered him. Personally encountered him. Not intellectually thought about an idea of him, but sensed him and heard from him, and been led by him. I have experienced his work in me and through me and for me and to me. Witnessed the inexplicable, the “there is no scientific/medical/financial explanation for this” numerous times.

I’ve not been pretending or performing all these years. I’ve been desperately clinging, calling out to him like a baby to its mommy, for courage, for direction, for sustenance. And when doubt has threatened to overwhelm me, to crash over my head like a wave in the Pacific, the tiniest bulwark of faith inside me remains unmoved. I, the Lord, am still here with you.

So what’s with the doubt?

Lord, God, are you it, or should I expect something else, like…compost?

It comforts me to stumble upon Cousin John the Baptist, smelling even worse than usual in a pit of a prison cell, simply because he was faithful to his calling. I wonder if he is hungry. I wonder if he is dreaming of steak, of fish, even of grasshopper and honey? If he thinks of how God himself fed Elijah and strengthened him, yet left J the B here, rotting in jail, simply for speaking truth?

“Jesus, is this stuff really for real or are we all just kidding ourselves?”

For lots of us, doubt and faith walk as closely together as two young lovers on a moonlit night, as close as body and shadow. For some of us, doubt is an electric fence that drives us back toward the Father, the giver of all good gifts, in whom there is no shifting shadow.

The shadow of doubt is always shifting.

Its existence is why the Lord spends so much time in Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Numbers telling us to set up feasts and festivals and remembrances to the Lord, giving us instructions on what to do when we realize we have strayed and want to return.

Doubt is big, and it never completely goes away. In this lifetime, anyway.

God is bigger, and never wasn’t and always will be.

I’m not making this up to be greeting card smarmy. Three things, 1 Corinthians 13 tells us, remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest is love. That’s God. God, John wrote, is love. If faith and hope also remain, what does that say about doubt?

Jesus’s response to John the Baptist’s jailhouse question comforts me even more than John’s weakness:

Jesus replied to them, “Go and report to John what you hear and see: The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, those with leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are told the good news, and blessed is the one who isn’t offended by me.” Matthew 11:4-6

It’s the lesson from Peter’s walk on the water: “Look at me, Cousin Johnny. It’s okay. Focus on me.” It’s a summary of the Pentateuch in four verses: Look to me and remember.

That comforts me. Jesus comforts me as he comforts John. Look to Jesus and rest.

Jesus goes on to tell the crowd that John himself is Elijah, my depressed prophet friend who has seen amazing things and also cries and gripes to the Lord and hates people and woe-is-me’s to an art form.

Kind of like me.

Not that I’m equating myself to John the Baptist or Elijah. I’ve never called down fire from heaven, and you’d have to threaten the life of my grandchild before I’d even consider eating a grasshopper. But boy howdy, have I doubted. And I’ve whined and complained to the Lord God Almighty like nobody’s business.

On the other hand… Jesus did say:

“Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist! Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.

Matthew 11:11

So there is that.

Even if she is a woman. Even if she sometimes wonders about non-existence. Even if her faith needs an electron microscope to measure.

When I visit with folks who are deconstructing, and listen to them share how they just cannot believe anymore, or will not believe it the same as they were taught, and hear them describe the bigness of their doubt, I no longer panic.

Where once I would have slung the Bible at them, I now recognize the spiritual gift of doubt. Let that doubt send you for away for a while if it must. Unravel your citizenship in heaven from your citizenship on earth. Detangle tradition from truth. So much of the focus has been on the wrapping paper instead of the Gift of Life itself.

Photo by Jaspreet Kalsi on Unsplash Mustard seed, larger than actual size. Unless you’re on your phone. Then, I can’t tell you.

But deep within you is a tiny, tiny bulwark, the size of a fraction of a mustard seed. And there will be a moment when that immovable seed of faith will cause those tsunamis of doubt to split enough for you to know:

“I am still here. I will never leave you or forsake you.”

When the doubts regain their strength, let them drive you to that voice. The voice. Let that voice draw you back to your own exploration, your own reading of the word, cover to cover, without study bible notes, without commentaries, and please God without podcasters telling you how to interpret. Invite your doubts along. They are coming with you, regardless.

Just you, your doubts, and the Holy Spirit.

My doubts exist. So do yours. They are a gift that I hate. I’m so grateful for their work, when they drive me back to the Garden, to the cross, to the empty tomb, to the spirit who gives me strength for today and … sometimes… bright hope for tomorrow. I loathe them when they crash against my heart and soul and torment me with…compost.

My faith is small. My faith is least in the kingdom. My doubt is big. And even as my faith grows, so does the discovery of my doubts. But God, the Lord God, is. I cannot get around it.

And God remains bigger still.

May you be blessed, knowing that the Lord God himself, who was, and is and is to come, and Jesus, who is seated at the right hand of the father, interceding for you [obviously me, too, but it’s about you now], and the Holy Spirit, who searches your heart and knows your weakness and also intercedes for you with groanings too deep for words, cheer you onward, with love and hope and faith.

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field.

It’s the smallest of all the seeds, but when grown, it’s taller than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and nest in its branches.” Matthew 13:31-32

Photo by Marcela Rogante on Unsplash Mustard Field

1. This and all subsequent Scripture quotations are from:

Christian Standard Bible (CSB)

The Christian Standard Bible. Copyright © 2017 by Holman Bible Publishers. Used by permission. Christian Standard Bible®, and CSB® are federally registered trademarks of Holman Bible Publishers, all rights reserved.