Doubt

I've been spending sometime today when I needed a break from tedious data work reading and for the first time in a while participating in a discussion at badchristian.com about doubt and it's place for a Christian. As I was growing up I distinctly remember being told that it was okay to doubt your faith and to ask questions - however it seemed as though it was okay as long as you were working yourself back to a good CRC belief system. Or at least reformed.

This doesn't seem to be enough for me however. I've always been one to have to do things my own way, just ask my Mother, she'll be happy to tell you that my first words were not mama or dada they were a complete sentence: "I can do it myself". But I digress. I reached a point probably during college where the reasons "that's the way we do it" or "that's the way it's always been done" were not enough. There had to be a reason the first person did things that way. My favorite anecdotal example being the woman who cut the ends off of her pot roast before putting it in the oven to cook. Someone asked her why she did it that way - she said it was because her mother did. When she asked her mother, the mother answered that her mother had done it that way. When the mother/grandmother was asked about she answered that the roasting pan she had was too small to fit the entire roast in so she cut off the ends. It had everything to do with getting by, nothing to do with the quality of that meat.

I wanted to know about the why of the practices. I was taught a lot of theology and catechism and right and wrong ways to act. Except the right and wrong ways to act were never tied into the theology and catechism - it was more about the way everything had always been done and worrying whether people were thinking you were holy enough. And when there wasn't a satisfying answer to why we did the things we did I started to question why we believed the things we did and in my quest I've found so many things that make more sense to me. And I've found when I understand why some of the old things are I identify with them as well.

All this to say I don't know that I really knew what I believed, what I wanted, where I was going until I started doubting and asking questions. With no target in sight except that of Truth with a capital T. I still don't have really much of any answers - in fact the more I question things the more questions present themselves. It's like when you hit that moment in school where the more you learn the more you realize you really know a speck compared to what is available to be known. And honestly I feel as though I've grown in relationship to God (however you choose to understand that) in the questioning - it's as if the message I'm getting is "Hey, you're finally trying to get to know me. I like that...let's keep doing it ." So that's what I'm going to do.