Week of Weirdness

This week has been a
week of weirdness.

Not scary awful badness. Just weirdness. And since I don’t
usually know what to do with weirdness, that lack of knowledge has made this
week even weirder.

This is my brother, Oliver. For five years, he served in the
Army. That five years came to an end a week ago Friday, and he’s been home
since late that night. He spent three of those five years overseas (two
nonconsecutive years in Iraq and one in Germany), and while this big sister is
thankful to have him out of combat zones, she is not used to having him home.
In fact, I was really starting to like the system in place… the one where he
came home for just long enough to remind me of the things about him that drove
me nuts before he took off again. Now I’m remembering everything that drove me
nuts, and he’s not going anywhere.

2. This week has been
a week filled with doubt.

Before you start flipping out and asking me if I’m
questioning my place on the WR at this particular moment, let me just say that
I’m not. How long I am to be on it is entirely up to God, but I trust in this
moment that this is what He has planned for me.

The doubts have been in the littler things this week. In
fundraising details. In relationships. In how I ‘get my healthy living on’. As well as other things.

I’ve heard both ends of the spectrum when it comes to this
doubting thing and, in the past, I’ve erred more on the side of the spectrum
where doubt is absolutely a sin and a “good Christian” would never have a
moment of it. The problem I’ve found in practice is that the more I try to not
doubt, the more I do doubt. The more I doubt, the worse I feel, and the harder
I try to not doubt, which turns into this vicious cycle I cannot break out of.

What it comes down to for me is this:

1. God
   doesn’t want me to follow Him blindly. There are untold numbers of
   verses in the Bible that encourage us to ask questions, to weigh what we
   are seeing/hearing/reading/experiencing against His word (and vice versa).
   He doesn’t want us to believe Him because He commanded us to… He wants it
   because we choose to, and to know why we are choosing to.

2. God
   knows how to answer my doubts. When I think about doubting, my mind
   goes straight to Doubting Thomas. That’s how everyone knows the disciple
   Thomas in the Bible, after all… the disciple who doubted. In the last year
   or so, I’ve come to realize a few things about Thomas, though. The most
   important realization (for the sake of this blog) is that in the moment
   when Jesus appeared to Thomas for the first time after the resurrection, God
   knew what was necessary to quiet the doubts in Thomas’s heart and head. The
   same way He knows about mine.

That second point has never been so clearly illustrated as
in the last twenty-four hours. A friend I haven’t seen or spoken much with in
quite a while left a comment on a blog I wrote last week with information about
an upcoming fundraiser. It’s one that, though I’ve been praying and asking God
to bring people to get involved, has born no fruit as of yet. These pesky
doubts nipping at my heels have made me wonder if I should just drop it in
hopes of finding some other fundraiser that will be much more successful.

The words of encouragement spoken in that comment were
exactly what I needed to hear in that moment. At that time, those words brought
peace. I know that there’s going to be times in the future where doubt will
appear in some form, but I have to trust that God will – in His time and in
ways I may not be expecting – prove my doubts to be false and give me peace
once again.