Words of Encouragement
I had no idea, as a small child, that the prayer my parents taught me, which I recited every night as I knelt beside my bed, would be something I'd carry as a challenge and a comfort for the remainder of my life. That prayer was,
"Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray my soul the Lord to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen."
When I was very small, my mother had to remind me to kneel at my bedside, to fold my hands and bow my head. Then she would stand in the open doorway with the hall light at her back, while I crouched by my bed in the semi-darkness and repeated those words.
Then, after a few years when I developed the habit of praying before bedtime, my parents, instead of standing at the door, would simply wish me a goodnight and leave me to take care of my nightly routine alone. Yet, sometime when I was about 13 or 14, I don't remember precisely though I do remember the event, as I prayed at my bedside, I stopped. I did so because a thought ran through my head that scared me quite alot. At that moment I thought, "What if nobody's listening?"
As a small child, the presence of my parents in the doorway was sufficient to sustain my confidence in God, but as I grew older and they no longer stood beside me as I prayed, I began to learn how fragile faith and hope can be, and how faith requires much more than simply following the rituals or knowing the stories.
Of course, I'm not the only person who ever faced this conundrum. As a matter of fact, Carl Holladay, himself a devout Christian and a scripture scholar once wrote,
"We wonder whether hope is an illusion. What might be competes with what never will be. Hope dances on the edge of wishing, comes close to expecting, and then retreats into wishing. We do not want to be disappointed, so we wish instead of hope. The one flirts with the future; the other flings itself toward the future."
In other words, sisters and brothers, it's not uncommon for a believer to face that terrible moment when we wonder if we're living in hope or are we spending our time merely wishing? That's what I faced during my teen years, and with no certain answer, I discontinued my nightly routine before bedtime and for many years thereafter, I stopped praying altogether.
As a teen I simply drifted away from God. There never was a time when I disbelieved in God, I simply refused to turn to him. So, I suppose I could be correctly judged to have no faith during those years. It is true. I didn't, because there were no signs of it; I did not pray or worship and the religious practices I retained were merely associations with holidays like Christmas, which were more about sentimentality than religion.
In my life, as I suppose in most others, there comes a time when we—standing between wishing and hoping—must finally decide if we believe in God or not. "Believing" isn't simply acknowledging that God exists, it's really about deciding if we're going to spend our lives knowing, loving and serving God or not. So, I came to my defining moment and, at that time, I knew without benefit of miracles, signs or wonders—I just knew—that not only did I believe in God, but that I wanted to know him, I wanted to feel his love, and I wanted to spend the rest of my life building a relationshp with him. That, of course, didn't happen all at once, and it came only after about a decade of being away from the Lord. Yet, it came nonetheless. Don't let that fool you into thinking that my struggles ended at that time, for they most certainly did not.
I believe, sisters and brothers, that everyone must struggle with profound questions of faith. Faith, after all, is not easy, and it's not "certainty." For certainty doesn't require faith. Saint Paul defines faith as "confident assurance concerning things hoped for, and conviction about things we cannot see." Yet, "condifence" and "conviction" are not "certainty". Instead, it's an intangible and unprovable belief that sometimes defies explanation. When we "believe" we demonstrate that we are "open" to the Lord. When we say "I believe" we're saying that we're open to the possibility of something more than we already know of the Lord. Still, that's not quite far enough, for the Bible itself tells us that we should "love the Lord our God with all our mind, and heart, and soul and strength." Now that's faith!
I've listened to many people who struggled with faith over the past twenty-two years. One young man, named Henry, I met when he was barely twenty-one years old. He and I had some great conversations together. He was bright, and intuitive, and insightful and self-confident. One day he decided to drop a bomb on me by admitting, "I'm not sure I believe in God." My first instinct was to jump down his throat! How often does that happen? Don't we often quickly forget our own journey and behave as if we always had the faith we do now? Well, after I restrained my impulse to argue with him, I settled down and started to listen to his explanation. Henry wasn't denying God's existence. What he was doing was struggling with the idea of a God who loved him and who was involved in his life. So, there was a basic openness in Henry, but he just hadn't made it to the point where he was going to trust God. That's a very different position than denial! Well, after two years Henry and I had another talk and he shared with me that he was getting a little more comfortable with the idea of a God who wanted to be part of his life. Although I've lost touch with him, I pray that Henry's journey took him all the way to a full-blown faith. I pray that he's now sharing his life with the Lord.
There are a couple of other things I want to reassure you about, sisters and brothers.
First, God does not abandon those who struggle with their faith. Just look at the Scriptures. There are many stories of people whose faith was weak, even people who doubted, but the Lord continued to work with them. Consider, for example, Saint Thomas, the original "doubter". There is no other clearer statement of doubt in the Bible than, "I will not believe!" Yet, did Jesus give up on him because of his lack of faith? No! And neither did he give up on anyone else whose faith was weak. As a matter of fact, everyone's faith was weak, except perhaps Mary's and John the Baptist's—though one might consider John's question, "Are you the one or should we look for another" a moment of doubt.
There is another thing I want you to remember. There's only one instance when our doubts become deadly and that's when we allow our struggles to devolve into denial. That, unfortunately, happens at times. Sometimes our spiritual struggles cause us to retreat from God, to build walls between the Lord and ourselves that not even God's grace can penetrate. Sometimes things get so bad that we begin to close ourselves off from the possibility of God and all the grace he offers. Now, that's when doubt becomes deadly!
So, my final encouragements to you are these. Do not let your doubts rule your lives! Pray even if you feel no one is listening and worship even if you get nothing out of it. The only way to overcome our doubts is to routinely put ourselves in a position to experience God's presence. Only our absence will undo all the good the Lord is working in our lives. Stay close to him. Keep talking to him, and I promise you, God will bring to completion the good work he has begun in you, right up until the day of Christ Jesus!