Faith & Doubt

Psalm 124. A song sung after the danger has passed, after the floodwaters have gone down. The whole psalm is a backward look — and it asks a question of us we almost never stop to ask.

This is the world the Bible was written for. Most of us have been quietly assuming that stability is the baseline. It is not. The Scriptures are letters from the same trouble we are now in.

Jesus prayed on the night before he died. He asked, three times, for the cup to pass. The cup was not taken. This is the most important unanswered prayer in the Bible.

There are seasons when prayer goes quiet. Where the words won't come and the ceiling feels closer than it used to. If you have lived with depression or anxiety, you know this silence.

The stoning of Paul at Lystra. It is hard to read it without thinking that Paul, lying in the dust outside the city, may have remembered another stoning — one he had once stood by and approved of.

Henri Nouwen pointed out that the gospel writers used four words to describe what Jesus did with the bread. He took it. He blessed it. He broke it. He gave it. Nouwen believed these four movements describe not just a miracle but a life. Yours.

The hardest thing about waiting is not the length of it. It is the silence that comes with it — the feeling that the waiting means something about you, or about whether God is still there.

Most of us were never handed the terms explicitly. We absorbed them slowly, in Sunday school and sermon illustrations and the quiet pressure of being around people who seemed to have it together. The contract felt real. The problem is that God never signed it.

A doctor once told me that when the body heals a deep wound, it does not replace the original tissue. It produces something new. That observation changed the way I understand what God is doing in a wounded life.