Written and Directed by Justin Snyder
A blog.

The Cocoon Of Doubt

A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it.
-Tim Keller

It is an experience I had been through before, but never to this extent.  I had come off of a spiritual mountaintop. God had felt so close I could almost touch him.

And suddenly, he was gone.

I woke up one morning an atheist.  My prayers felt like they didn’t reach the ceiling. Questions that once did not seem relevant to me were suddenly a plague, a stumbling block. I looked at the world around me and got angry, frustrated, exasperated. The circumstances of life seemed ridiculous. The sovereignty of God felt like a copout for the things we didn’t understand. Jesus the man became an unknowable figure, and the New Testament, incredulous. I became an outsider looking into Christian culture. None of it made sense to me.

I couldn’t put my finger on it. Was it something I ate? There had been shattered expectations, disappointment with God, emotional highs and lows. There had been conversations about science and religion. But it was none of those things. I had not been compelled by any arguments or even circumstances of life, but my own inner struggle. It was a feeling. A deep, unsettling feeling I could not escape. Like the Spirit of God had left me.

I echoed the cry of Job: “if I go to the east, he is not there; if I go the west, I do not find him.”

I read the Psalms over those months (sixty percent of the Psalms are laments). I related to them in ways I never have before. And through the doubt, I grew.

*****

Others were going through similar things.

Hiking on the Appalachian Trail with my old roommate Joel, I said, “you ever feel like God just disappears?” “Yea,” he said. “I’m actually there right now.”

My friend Val was going through it. And he had had conversations with others that were as well. People who had followed Christ for years, struggling with questions they had never considered before.

Then there was my friend Alyse who had become a part of our church community. She was a confessing non-believer, but seemed more passionate about truth than most of my Christian friends.  She asked questions few had thought of. She wanted to believe Christianity was true, but had doubts she couldn’t overcome.

I knew there was something in the air when soon after all of this, Pastor Jon started a sermon series at church called Masterpiece. It was about doubting the Bible and it’s credibility.

I asked Jon why this topic.  Maybe God had told him in a dream to preach on this subject.

He just said he’d been planning it for a while.

*****

If faith is a butterfly, then doubt is a cocoon.

I wish Christians would be more open about their doubts. I know that everyone has them. Many are ashamed to talk about them, feeling they’ll be judged. Others, out of fear, ignore their doubts completely.

But I believe if we embraced our doubts, it would yield a stronger and truer faith.

One may easily assume that doubt is the opposite of faith. But it’s not. The opposite of faith is unbelief. Doubt, on the contrary, is an evidence of faith.

There is a distinct difference between unbelief and doubt. Unbelief is a choice of will, a deciding not to believe. Doubt is an unsureness, a wavering, a skepticism. Doubt is a struggle.

And struggle causes perseverance.

I have come to believe that the deeper the faith, the deeper the doubt. Real faith takes risks, and to take a risk, one must have some doubt. Real faith trusts when it doesn’t always make sense. Real faith stares into the darkness and lives to tell about it.

Doubt is the cocoon that overwhelms our immature faith so that we can be reborn with the wings and colors of a truer, authentic faith.

Real faith doubts.