When I was a very small child being lost was one of the worst experiences I can recall. Losing ones parents in a crowd of giants is terrifying for most children because all the security they know is often found only in the faces of Mum and Dad. Being lost creates a sense of complete insecurity, and even when another caring adult takes your hand, the fear might dissipate but the insecurity remains.
As I have gotten older I have come to realise that being lost is not simply a child’s experience, we’re just better at masking the insecurity that comes with it. We might be more subtle but the experience is no less real.
Having worked with people for many years now, it seems being lost is another way of describing “doubt”. Doubt is one of those thorns in our minds that erupt from time to time when something familiar is lost to us. Often that thing is a fragment of belief about God or ourselves. We underestimate the power of that loss in its effect on our daily life.
To a great degree who we are is framed on what we believe. Most of our deep beliefs are hidden from those around us, but when a belief shifts, those nearest to us see the symptom in our behaviour and it’s at that point that specific doubts rises to the surface. Oddly enough our behaviour is usually the first indicator to ourselves that something is amiss. Many of our deeply held beliefs are so embedded we aren’t aware that we doubt them until our behaviour tells us there’s a problem.
The mathematician and Philosopher, Blaise Pascal said that most doubts arise out of disobedience to God rather than intellectual questioning. When we start behaving in ways that are out of sync with our beliefs it’s what modern psychologists term “cognitive dissonance”. In English it means there is a tension between what a person believes and how they behave.
The problem is that most of us just plod on through life without facing these tensions until they are enormous. This is especially true of religious people. I know this because I have observed it to be the case so many times. Does God really exist? Is the Bible reliable? Did Jesus really rise from the dead? and so on. They are quite normal questions
Lord Tennyson once said, “There lies more faith in honest doubt than in all their creeds”. Doubt is good when it’s honest, but honesty means paying attention to Pascal’s observation - does doubt come from living against ones actual beliefs or has it come from genuine reflection? One is honest the other is disobedience.
Jesus said the “truth will set you free”. But what is the truth when doubts plague us? To start with we must ask, “are we genuinely searching for truth or merely creating it to be what we want it to be”? The former helps us find our way home. The latter keeps us comfortable in our misery.