I’m always looking for the easy way out. I’m inherently lazy, short-sighted, impatient, passive or fill in the blank with some other vice. I do not like walking in the tension of anything and if there is a more comfortable option, I will take it with a cherry on top, thank you very much. I fear the unknown—especially when the unknown exists within me, not just around me.
I was created from dust and bone fragments, so I don’t know why I would believe perfection is possible before the return of Christ. I seek it though, friends. I seek it.
One of my favorite passages of Scripture, one I return to again and again and again, is from Mark chapter 9. Jesus had just undergone the transfiguration and had come back down the mountain, running into the father of a demon possessed boy. The father cries to Jesus, “If you can do anything, have compassion and help us!” Sweet Jesus responds with incredulity: “If? If I can heal him? All things are possible to him who believes.” And this, my favorite line in all of scripture, is the father’s response: “I believe. Help my unbelief.”
I come from a charismatic background, not name it and claim it, health, wealth and prosperity, but certainly a side that believes words have life or death in them. That if we speak death, we run the risk of experiencing it, and if we speak life, then the odds are higher we’ll experience it. I look back now and see the ways I misunderstood and ingested theology without parsing it for myself, eating the words given me instead of the Scripture informing them. But what resulted for me is that I became a bundle of fear, afraid to ever speak what was actually true about myself, my sin, my fears, my anxieties, and only willing to speak what was not true, that I had assurance, joy, peace, faith. I didn’t know how to walk in the tension of speaking what was not fully true but which I wanted to be true and speaking what was true but I wanted to be untrue. I could not have said, “Help my unbelief,” because to confess unbelief seemed like the pathway to destruction, but I felt like a liar every time I said, “I believe.”
All that changed in early 2010, when I could not live the lie of belief anymore. I pounded my fists into the tan carpet of my rental house and cried harder than ever before and said to God, for the first time ever, “I do not believe in you!” I have never heard the audible voice of God, but I will never forget the strong impression of the Father picking up his robes and running toward me saying, “Finally. We can begin with this.”
I think there are two temptations for the Christian who doubts. The first is to only say what is yet untrue (I believe) and the second is to only say what is true (I have unbelief). If you come from a background, like mine, where to utter words of unbelief means you are silenced by well-meaning friends who say you’re just going through a hard time and it will wear off, you probably will be bound up in living the lie of belief, and, as Jeremiah 17 says, “You will not see good when it comes.” If you come from a background where it’s OK to have struggles and wrestle with truth and faith, you might be afraid to say the words, “I believe,” because you don’t want to lie about having something you don’t fully have.
