Navigating Your Crisis of Faith
Words by Josh Skaggs
Artwork by fran_kie
“God, I don’t think I believe in you anymore.”
I was halfway through college and my world was shifting. Sitting in a dark room by myself late one night, I felt my body cramp around those forbidden words. Tense shoulders. Strained breath. I had never voiced doubt like this, and it felt wrong. Damning. I feared what I might lose if I followed those words to their end: my faith, my friends, my sense of self?
And yet, because I addressed God directly, that statement took on a more familiar cadence, becoming a prayer. I was inviting God into a conversation, one we carried longer than I thought. He stayed with me as my world continued to shift. He’s still here.
A crisis of faith is not like puberty: no one sits you down and tells you what to expect. That’s unfortunate because most of us will enter times of unraveling, when we wonder what will become of our walk with God. Lacking a frame for this kind of experience, we proceed with fear and trembling, braced for the worst, not knowing that there is beauty and goodness to be found.
I’d like to pass along a few tools that have helped me to reconstruct my faith. I can’t map out the wild territory God is leading you into, but I can point out a few landmarks and landmines you’re likely to find along the way.
1. Define Terms
From the start, we should take care to choose the right terms. Words like “crisis of faith,” “falling away,” and “deconstruction” miss the mark by framing this experience primarily as a loss. A change of terms might alleviate some existential dread.
How about “reconstruction?” “Exploration?” My faith isn’t enough anymore, and I’m grappling with God in new ways.
Defining our experience is tricky, especially when we don’t know where it might lead. But refusing simple narratives of loss helps us stay open to curiosity, exploration, and discovery. We can breathe a little easier.
2. Belong to a People
Here’s something you may not have heard: your questions don’t disqualify you from God’s family. You have a safe place here, at home in a robust community of trustworthy fathers, mothers and siblings in the faith.
Granted, maybe the people around you don’t seem like that kind of family. I’ve seen friends lose relationships or even get kicked out of churches for asking the “wrong” questions, so I know how unsafe it can feel to be the skeptic in the room. Big questions trigger people, and even well-meaning friends can respond with fear and judgments. (And we should admit: we often respond with fear and judgments of our own.)
I won’t deny that bringing your heart to people is dangerous. It also happens to be the best way to keep your heart alive. Not everyone is trustworthy with your story, but you’re invited to belong among those who are.
Find some people whose love for Jesus compels you, and risk letting them into your story. Maybe it’s an author whose voice you trust, or maybe it’s a close group of friends from church. Be willing to listen to people who aren’t as intellectual as you. If you are too smart to learn from a stay-at-home mom, you are not yet smart enough. If you are too well read to ask a grandfather what he knows about God, you’re missing out. Belong in the family, even as you raise questions.
3. Engage Your Whole Self
This one goes way back to Descartes, the philosopher who squeezed his eyes shut and eked out that terrible axiom: I think, therefore I am. Rather than engaging the mystery of otherness, of a world outside his own head, he confined truth to what he could cram inside his skull.
Apologetics can get stuck in the same trap. Well-meaning apologists get lost trying to nail down the truth with a checklist of proofs, debating atheists and scientists as if all of life could be reduced to some sort of logic puzzle. In this way of thinking, God is on trial, and we gather evidence to build a case for or against him. With all due respect to “A Case for Christ,” I think we need something more.
While the scientific method promises the cold eye of objectivity, its coldness is what makes it a faulty perceiver. As Wendell Berry writes, “To define knowledge as merely empirical is to limit one’s ability to know. It enfeebles one’s ability to feel and think.” Even though our knee-jerk response to big questions is to stand aloof, we must recognize this as the coping mechanism it is. Are we brave enough to bring our hearts into the conversation?
4. Ask Bigger Questions
We begin our reconstruction with heady, urgent, and (in hindsight) banal questions. Is evolution real? Are we predestined to heaven or hell? But if we’re willing to wade deeper in, becoming more honest with ourselves, we might realize that our true questions are much more significant. Do I belong? Am I loved? What is God like?
I happen to believe that our greatest questions are variations on a singular theme: Will I see God face to face? I also happen to believe that God loves this question. I see this played out in the ancient story of Job, whose great suffering gave rise to the kinds of questions that I long to ask. Why is there so much suffering in the world? Is God good? Why won’t he answer me? In the midst of long arguments with his friends, Job is brave enough to voice this complaint: “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his seat!”
Astonishingly, God shows up.
There’s a reason most of us prefer shallower waters. The person who is bold enough to question God must be prepared for God to respond—and to question in return. We start out as the judge, demanding answers and proofs; if we keep going, we find ourselves in the hot seat. When God finally shows himself to Job, his first words cut to the quick: “Brace yourself like a man.”
5. Belong to God
The person who doubts can easily feel exiled from God. We used to worship. We used to have a kingdom, a people. We used to be so sure. Now we find ourselves outside the gates, living among the damned and confused, unable to find our way back into the simplicity of the Gospel.
But what if the Gospel makes provision for questioners like us? Again and again, God affirms his place among the wanderers, exiles, and complainers. He keeps and preserves us. He seeks and embraces us. Even the darkness is not dark to him. If we make our bed in hell, he is there.
We may as well acknowledge him in the dark. Afraid, overburdened with our many concerns, we can lean into his dreadful closeness, his awful comfort, and ask the questions we’ve been burning to ask—the questions God has been burning to hear.
Print isn’t dead.
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