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I fall in and out of doubt. Y’know, with God and all.
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t remember ever actually “knowing” for sure that God didn’t exist.
And on better mornings I wake up in awe of the simple miracle that I have survived as many years as I have. On these mornings, I can hear God saying “Yeah, I guess you could call it a miracle… It’s just what I do.” Needless to say, on these mornings, I know with all certainty that God exists.
Other mornings, I wake up, and I don’t feel God. I feel other things—things like hunger, stress, obligations to others, and so on, but I cannot, whatever I do, feel the presence of God.
You cannot imagine how difficult it is to admit that sometimes I doubt whether He exists at all.
This all seems to come together in the church’s Easter story. As we go from the services of Holy Thursday through the rest of the week to Easter morning, I can easily imagine the despair that Jesus’ followers must have felt. A part of my mind knows a little bit about feeling like you’ve lost your Savior.
But I have an advantage the disciples did not have. More on that in a few paragraphs.
It’s an interesting thing about those mornings when I doubt, simply because I cannot feel God’s tangible and immediate presence. I don’t do that with other things. When I leave my family or my friends or my coworkers, I can remember that their presence was so real and so convincing that it never even crosses my mind to question whether they still exist, even when I cannot immediately see and feel their presence.
So I have to remind myself sometimes that it’s the same way with God. On the days when I’m not sure, I have to remind myself of the days God’s presence was so immediate as to convince me beyond all doubt.
This doesn’t come naturally to me. Sometimes it feels more like an intellectual exercise than a spiritual one.
But to keep myself getting up in the mornings, I have to keep telling myself, “You’ve known of God. You’ve felt His presence. You’ve noticed his work. And with a cosmically small bit of patience, so will it be again.”
The disciples couldn’t say that. They weren’t just doubting; It wasn’t an “I don’t know” thing. They could see the cross. They could see that their Savior was dead. It wasn’t even open to question. They had no reason or justification to tell themselves “So it will be again.” We modern Christians, unlike the first ones, can know from our own experiences (and those of each other) that it will.
Even if we have to reduce it to a rote academic exercise, we can nonetheless tell ourselves, with certainty and with experience on our side, that we will again feel and be sure of God’s presence, with no more than a few days’ patience and waiting.
And wouldn’t you know, every time I tell myself that, I end up being right!
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