doubt on Walls

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offence.

Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns Our only hope: to le...

We structure our churches and maintain them so as to shield us from God and to protect us from genuine religious experience…The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions...

When we aim at certainty when it comes to our Christian beliefs, it sets us up for failure. …Imagine someone with a lot of time on their hands who painstakingly constructs a five-foot-high house of...

God, our rock and refuge, there are plenty of things that we allow to erode our faith in you. When life gets stormy, we let our uncertainty cloud our trust in you. We think we know better and start re...

Faith is a way of waiting—never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing, because in the darkness we are all but a little lost. There is doubt hard on the heels of every belief, fear hard on the h...

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.

[These thoughts come from a journal entry of about 10 years ago when I was experiencing a deep and dark night of faith] I have found insight and wisdom for my journey with Christ in the writings of J...

Jesus, help me breathe My flimsy barricades of control are failing Again Worries pressing in Closer Closer Closer Stifling Searing I’m suffocating in ashen dreams Help me breathe Help me believe Al...

The famous entertainer W. C. Fields, known for his humor, love of drink, and agnosticism, found himself bedridden in his final illness. When a longtime friend visited and noticed Fields reading the Bi...

Friendship is the allay of our sorrows, the ease of our passions, the discharge of our oppression, the sanctuary of our calamities, the counselor of our doubts, the clarity of our minds, the emission ...

There is a Peanuts cartoon in which Lucy and Charlie Brown are walking home from school. Charlie Brown tells Lucy that he got straight As. Lucy responds, “I won’t believe it unless I see the report ...

Gracious, patient God, too often we don’t trust you. We don’t trust you enough to be honest with you, to share our doubts with you, or to be real with other people about our struggles. Lord, please he...

All the persons of faith I know are sinners, doubters, uneven performers. We are secure not because we are sure of ourselves but because we trust that God is sure of us.

Never doubt in the dark what God showed you in the light

Writer Michael Novak says that doubt is not so much a dividing line that separates people into different camps, as it is a razor’s edge that runs through every soul. Many believers tend to think doubt...

The Text Encounters with the Living Jesus This text from the Gospel of John is so rich and full that it could be divided up into several sermons. The entire chapter is a record of how different disc...

Fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves.

Most Christians can deal with inevitable doubts as long as there is room for doubt. But when a system is enforced that leaves no room for doubt, benign uncertainties can mutate into faith-destroying m...

Holy God, we confess that we feel like we are incapable of doing what you ask of us. In our hesitation and doubt, we confess that we do not do what you ask of us. Forgive us for our fear. Forgive us f...

Though God is at work, God hides… You have a choice: see God here or not; see salvation, or see only human courage; see the divine subtly at work, or see chance, luck of the draw on this day of lots.

O Holy One, we call to you and name you as eternal, ever-present, and boundless in love. Yet there are times, O God, when we fail to recognize you in the dailyness of our lives. Sometimes shame clench...

When most of us grow up in a faith tradition, we begin with an assumption that faith is good, while having doubts is bad. As we mature however, we realize that faith and doubt are not opposites, but i...

A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will ...

If the Lord Jehovah makes us wait, let us do so with our whole hearts; for blessed are all they that wait for Him. He is worth waiting for. The waiting itself is beneficial to us: it tries faith, exer...

Doubt is really the felt tension that exists between a belief you have and a contrary claim you do not yet believe…Simply put, doubt is that experience of one of our beliefs seeming like it might be f...

Faith is a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.

Gracious God, we come before you with humility, recognizing that doubt has led our decisions. We have allowed fear to lead, rather than love. Because of this, we have been unkind to our families, our ...

Maybe God has given some people belief like a pier, to stand on (and God has given those people’s steadiness to the church, to me, as a reminder, as an aid), and maybe God has given others something e...