A friend described a picture to me the other night: you wake up from a deep sleep. You’re in a dark room and can’t see much of anything except a bright light in one corner. You think it might be a window, but the light is too bright and you can’t quite distinguish what the source of the light is. The sun maybe? A lamp? As your eyes adjust, the light slowly comes into focus.
This, my friend Eva said to me, is how I see God. There is no doubt he is there, just like there is no doubt that the light is there. Rather, there is doubt as to what the light is exactly.
A little history: it was the last night of debrief and I asked Eva to pray over me, for the doubt I was feeling, for my unbelief. I like to make sense of things. Put me in a new city and I will have as much of it figured out as I can within a few minutes. I’m good at math, logic makes sense. When I first took the Myers-Briggs test, my personality was “the thinker.”
So naturally this part of me also applies to my faith. I often approach God from logic. I think about the world and see natural beauty and for me it makes sense that God created it. I remember how God has provided for me in the past and it makes sense that God is a good Father.
But at times, this logical part of me also makes it really hard to believe in God. My mind grasps for how God is really working. How can he be real when I can’t see Him my mind questions. I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks like this?
This was my mind other night. I had just spent an amazing time in worship, I had prayed over people and even felt the Holy Spirit working through me. But there I was, a few hours later, questioning if it was all just made up.
“You know He’s real” Eva convinced me. “But the fact that you can’t grasp Him fully makes you uncertain of Him.” Like the light in the dark room, I can’t make out all the edges and don’t understand it completely. And thats like my view of the Father, I don’t see where he starts and where he stops, logically my mind can’t comprehend Him fully.
Then she said something that really hit me: doubt comes from the head. It comes from logic.
But faith, that thing that our belief is rooted in, that resides in the soul.
Something clicked: I can’t overcome doubt with logic. Logically, God doesn’t always make sense. Faith though, is a completely different ball game. Faith means I will believe in God even when he doesn’t make sense. Faith says I am choosing to believe even when I can’t explain it with logic.
So that is what I have been praying. I have been praying for my faith to be stronger than my doubt in every instance. I have been praying that I’d have faith so strong and rooted in Christ that I wouldn’t question what God is doing or who He is.
This is my prayer not just for myself, but for you too:
“… that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” (1 Corinthians 2:5)
I pray that you would take a step of faith and believe even when you can’t see Him and even when it doesn’t all make sense.
