Quotes About Struggle

judging by how the Bible actually behaves—God did not design scripture to be a hushed afternoon in an oak-paneled library. Instead, God has invited us to participate in a wrestling match, a forum for us to be stretched and to grow.

Anyway, we don't need to get into all that. My point is simply, no, King David, the heavens are not telling the glory of God (Ps. 19:1)—at least not without a lot of heavy theological lifting and perhaps a double bourbon. The heavens actually freak me out and make me wonder whether there is a God at all

We can well imagine Jews feeling a bit out of their element—maybe intimidated and shamed by their own story, which began in slavery, ended in exile, and with absolutely zero contributions to philosophy or science. "Some 'chosen people'! What kind of God did you say you follow? Apparently one who lets bad things happen to you.

I think of Christians who, having been raised to read the Genesis creation story as literal science and history, leave for college, watch the History Channel, or log onto the internet, and find out that fossils and radiometric dating are in fact not hoaxes. That's how nice Christian college freshmen become atheists by Christmas break. If your faith can unravel that quickly, it's enough to make you question whether your faith is worth the effort at all.

I didn't know how to "do" faith without making sure my thoughts about God were lined up, and so, once those thoughts failed to be compelling, my faith sank.

One of the great comforts of Israel's epic is that it contains raw expressions of fierce doubt and lack of trust in God embraced by the ancient Israelites as part of their faith. I am thankful to God for this Bible rather than a sanitized one where spiritual struggles of the darkest kind are brushed aside as a problem to be fixed rather than accepted as part of the journey of faith.

Christians today have more in common with the Israelites wandering through a lonely and threatening desert or exiled to a hostile land than with Paul and most other New Testament writers. The Old Testament doesn't speak in the booming voice of imminent triumph. It speaks of generation after generation of the faithful and not so faithful, of successes and failures, of God's presence and God's absence.

this quest for certainty is running on fumes.

But doubt is not the enemy of faith, a solely destructive force that rips us away from God, a dark cloud that blocks the bright warm sun of faith. Doubt is only the enemy of faith when we equate faith with certainty in our thinking.

Doubt tears down the castle walls we have built, with the false security and permanence they give, and forces us outside to walk a lonely, trying, yet cleansing road. In those times, it definitely feels like God is against us, far away, or absent altogether. But what if the darkness is actually a moment of God's presence that seems like absence, a gift of God

To mention just a few: Brian McLaren, The Last Word and After That; Valerie Tarico, Trusting Doubt; Greg Boyd, Benefit of the Doubt; Rachel Held Evans, Faith Unravelled (formerly, Evolving in Monkeytown); Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God; Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.

Paradoxically, the challenges of our day-to-day existence are sustained reminders that our life of faith simply must have its center somewhere other than in our ability to hold it together in our minds.

Andrew Perriman at "P.OST" (postnost.net).

Doubt signals not God's death but the need for our own—to die to the theology we hold to with clenched fists. Our first creeping feelings of doubt are like the distant toll of a graveyard chapel, alerting us that the dying process is coming our way.

We have to die, and the choice is ours. If we don't, we are still holding on to something. And if we are holding on, we aren't really following. Just sort of following. Standing around. [Oh God, what did I sign up for? This Christianity thing is hard. Deep breath . . .] The apostle Paul chimes in, too: I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. (Galatians 2:19–20)

no one lives in the scripted places of the Bible all the time, where God shows up as planned, tells us exactly what we need to do, and things work out

The big lesson I learned from wrestling with my own curveballs is how deeply my faith in God had been cemented in fear—which is to say, how I viewed God as very much antagonistic toward me. And so any thought on my part of listening to my experiences and interrogating my inherited faith—to inspect its boundaries let alone climb over its walls—was seen as a crisis that had to be averted or at least resolved immediately.

Aligning faith in God and certainty about what we believe and needing to be right in order to maintain a healthy faith—these do not make for a healthy faith in God. In a nutshell, that is the problem. And that is what I mean by the "sin of certainty.

my disruptive experiences are not outside impositions to or an attack on my faith, but are the soil out of which my faith matures and takes shape.

Like a frail plant that needs careful tending and constant protection from sun and wind, perhaps the real problem wasn't me but the fragile, unsustainable version of Christianity I had been told was my only option.

The darkness does us a favor by exposing control as an illusion. When everything is removed, "Where can I take back some control here?" eventually ceases being the active question and is replaced with a plea: "Lord, help me let go of control. Help me die. Help me trust.

When we are taught that the Bible has to meet these unrealistic expectations for our faith to be genuine, the end product is a fragile, nervous faith.

Feeling like God is far away, disinterested, or dead to you is part of our Bible and can't be brushed aside. And that feeling—no matter how intense it may be, and even offensive as it may seem—is never judged, shamed, or criticized by God. Worshipping other gods or acting unjustly toward others gets criticized about every three sentences, but not this honest talk of feeling abandoned by God.

Mother Teresa. According to her own journal, she was in her dark night more or less from 1948 until near the time of her death in 1997.