Sacred Doubt: A Confession

There are moments when I doubt that a God exists.

There are days when those moments stretch into what seem like years packed into seconds, a timeless expanse of yearning for something solid upon which I can stand. Questions plague my ever-searching and never-satisfied mind, incessantly pestering my perpetual curiosity.

But who am I to know anything? My search for knowledge has only ever led to more questions, as if every door of truth that I enter leads me ever deeper into an infinite chasm of endless mystery. It seems rather audacious and presumptuous to have ever thought that I could truly know anything, especially about divinity itself.

Doubt has been my constant companion, particularly in the last few years. I have walked with doubt while teaching youth about Jesus, a person who I wasn’t sure was anyone except a man that lived two thousand years ago. I led public prayers to a God that I wasn’t sure was real. I studied the Bible, something that I often thought of as nothing more than a collection of words written by men.

This is still true today.

Doubt is still my companion today. I do not write these words to tell you about how I used to be. No – this is my life today, which might seem like a wild confession by a “professional Christian”.

Yes, there are still moments that I doubt that this whole thing I have confessed to be believing is even real. I am not the only person in ministry to have dealt with doubt. That may make you uncomfortable. I understand, as it makes me deeply uncomfortable as well.

For those of you that do not live with doubt, I envy you. I wouldn’t wish this upon anyone because I know exactly the toll that it has taken on me.

I have this sneaky suspicion, though, that I am not alone here.

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It is unsettling to lose confidence in the belief that you held most closely, the God that you hold foundational to your very existence and identity. When these doubts first arose, it shook me to my core. I lost, for a moment, the firm belief of my past, present, and future. It felt as if the ground beneath me was not even there, and I began falling into the infinite abyss below.

Here is a poem that I wrote in 2017:

All is naught

or at least not as it seems

We fret over shadows

and rest our eyes in fires

voices call out from the abyss

“Everything is meaningless.”

Songs are but cymbals

and words are but wind

to and fro we go

with no goal but the end

All is not as it seems

or truly naught at all.

Can you hear the despair and frustration about this whole thing that I used to call faith? I was losing myself in the process of my faith deconstructing.

It is grief to lose something you have loved. For myself, I loved my faith. Christianity was what I was raised in and what was in my future. I had graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Christian Ministries, preparing for a lifetime in professional ministry. When I wrote that poem above, I had just recently graduated with Master’s degree in Theology. This was my life, and I had begun to believe that it was all for naught, that the whole thing was a sham.

My doubt was unravelling my identity, my hopes and dreams, my very self.

Perhaps that resonates with your story, with your own doubt. Do you feel like you’re losing yourself? Or maybe you feel like you’ve already lost yourself?

I am sorry.

You are not alone.

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Here’s a story that helps me in my times of doubt, and ironically, it comes from the Bible.

After Jesus is crucified and promptly resurrects, he appears to his disciples. They had not heard yet of his resurrection, and they were gathered together in a room where they were probably discussing what their futures now held. They had built their life around this guy who was now dead.

While they were gathered, the resurrected Jesus walks in the door. Minds were blown, except for one. We know him colloquially as ‘Doubting Thomas’. He gets that name from this moment, where he sees the resurrected Jesus and doesn’t believe he’s real. In other words, he doubts.

Thomas, who walked, ate, and laughed with Jesus, who bore witness to countless moments of Jesus defying the natural order of the world, doubted that Jesus could rise from the grave. Can you blame him?

How Jesus responds is what I find fascinating. One would think that the disciples, who had witnessed Jesus in the flesh, would be the first to believe that the one they called Christ could of course have risen from the grave. But Jesus doesn’t scold Thomas. He isn’t incredulous that one of his closest disciples doubted in his miraculous appearance.

Jesus doesn’t reprimand him at all. Instead, he invites Thomas to touch his wounds, to feel the holes in his body. The picture that I have of Jesus is one with a warm smile, arms held out to welcome Thomas’s doubts with intimacy, not anger.

For me, my doubt has not led me further away from Jesus, but instead I feel that it has led me into a closer intimacy with Jesus, like Thomas. I tried for so long to kill the person I was becoming, to remain unchanged, obedient to the person I was before. My fear of change, though, was the thing that was killing me.

The war I had with my doubt was killing me. A change began to take place when I no longer battled my doubt but embraced it instead. Doubt became a catalyst for transformation, making me more like the person I was created to be. The idol of certainty was a stumbling block, so it had to be cast out.

Now, doubt is a familiar companion, a friend who has helped guide me into a life of greater fulfillment and hope. I know less than I once did, but I think that’s a good thing. God is too big to be known.

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Often when I share with someone, especially someone who cares deeply for me, about my doubt, I can see a tinge of fear behind their eyes. It is probably a mix of fear and sadness: fear that I could walk away from the Church and sadness that I ever got to that point in the first place.

For a long time, I was afraid to confess my doubt, fearing that it would negatively impact someone else. I did not want my doubt to cause anyone to doubt me, so I hid myself. It’s why I kept this doubt from my wife, hiding my crumbling inner self behind a veneer of worship albums and faked prayers.

Hiding became something that was no longer an option though. I was crumbling, and I could not afford to hide my struggles any longer, so I told her. It felt so good to get it off my chest. How much pain could I have avoided if I was simply honest with her about my doubt, instead of hiding it out of fear that she would lose her faith in me? There’s no really knowing an answer to that question.

Perhaps you are in a place now too where you must tell someone about your doubt. If that is the case, I would be honored if you wanted to share your story with me. If you want to chat, you can send me an e-mail at josh.rumple@gmail.com. I would love to lend a listening ear to your story, bearing witness to your doubt.

You are not alone. I’m here with you.

With all the grace and peace I can muster,

Josh