Faith & Doubt

Monet painted his shadows blue and violet because the sky still lights the shade. The writer of Lamentations found God's love holding him in the ruins of Jerusalem. Your grey season may hold colour you cannot see yet.

Elisha's students admit their meeting place has grown too small. At the Jordan, a borrowed axe-head sinks, and the man cries out at once. Elisha asks him one question: where did it fall? A reflection on facing your loss and showing God the place.

You lie awake doing the sums, and the returns look thin. Eleven years of the same prayer. A parent who no longer knows your name. For tired people, 1 Corinthians 15:58 holds a promise: in the Lord, none of your labour is in vain.

The report used to take you three days. Now it takes nine seconds, and your job is to check it. Psalm 8 answers the question underneath that, and the answer is not a defence of what you can do.

You read the notice twice. A restructure, a reassignment, a posting from a church. You can do the work. The trouble sits in the gap between where you thought you would be by now and where you have actually been put.

A song of promise sung by people whose lives had not changed in months. Israel walked into the sea still complaining, and the water held anyway. On the hope that speaks before you can feel it.

Jacob lay down in open country with a stone under his head, running and undeserving, and heaven opened over him while he slept. A reflection on Genesis 28 for anyone who could not feel God anywhere near in the season that hurt most.

Jonah called it the pit, the deep, the realm of the dead. Every name except the one that turned out to be true. A reflection on Jonah 2 for anyone held in a place that feels more like confinement than care.

Mephibosheth's name carries bosheth, the Hebrew word for shame. He answered to it for twenty years in hiding. Then a king said the name out loud and gave him a son's seat, without asking him to feel better first.