God can be tricky for everyone.
Imagine three people in your church next Sunday. One, Wesley, has been taken to church by his parents every week since he was born. He’s not exactly tearing away from the faith, but he’s really struggling to process some of his less pleasant experiences in the church.
His mother, Ann, is still reeling from the loss of her father to a painful and prolonged illness. She’s asking herself questions as to how she still seeing God as good.
Ann’s friend, Scott, is sitting beside her. He didn’t have a religious upbringing and thinks of himself as scientifically minded, and he isn’t sure how the Bible and science connect. But he also has a sense that there’s something more out there than the material. Not necessarily a God but something. When this cropped up in conversation with Ann, she invited him to check out her church, and he’s still not really sure if it’s a place for a rational thinker like him.
All three of them find God to be tricky. They have doubts and serious questions, which don’t simply linger in the background but are perceived by them as something pressing in right now. Which can feel threatening. They wonder if their experience or exploration of faith will be eroded by all this uncertainty.
Normalizing Struggle
Wesley, Ann, and Scott aren’t experiencing some strange, new scenario. It may feel uncomfortable for them, but wrestling with questions and doubts isn’t the mark of a vanishing or impossible faith. It’s actually vital to a living one.
Surprisingly, God hasn’t revealed himself in a way which is immune to doubt. He could easily have done so. Maybe he could have revealed himself to us in the form of a mathematical equation we needed to solve or a logical proposition we could learn. Things we could master without any messy remainder.
Or, as I write in my book “Somethingism”:
God could easily leave us in no doubt: with no requirement to search or question. Each morning as we eat our breakfast, his voice could thunder from the skies: “Just to remind you that there is a God, and I am he.”
Or you could close your eyes, and there, etched inside your eyelids in bright lights, would be your daily message from God: “I love you,” “Try harder,” “I’m actually not that interested in you,” “Don’t forget your lunchbox,” or whatever it was he wanted to say.
Such means would leave us with no doubt that he existed and no question about what he wished to convey.
Yet, God has not done this. There are hints of him in the ordering of the universe described by mathematics and the logic expressed in our philosophical writings. But the clearest way he’s chosen to show himself is far more intriguing than these options—he’s come to us as a person, Jesus, living and walking among us. And knowing a person is a very different experience than knowing a formula or hearing a voice from the clouds.
