Faith Unraveled by Rachel Held Evans

Author:Rachel Held Evans [Evans, Rachel Held]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2014-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

Dan always says that as soon as you think you’ve got God figured out, you can bet on the fact that you’re wrong. That’s what he told me the following Sunday morning, as I lay curled up in a little ball in our bed, crying about how I’d rather that God just didn’t exist than that he be so angry and vengeful and cruel.

He sat down next to me and ran his fingers through my hair. “Well, have you considered the possibility that maybe you’re wrong?” he asked.

“You mean that God’s ways are higher than our ways?”

“Well, sort of. What I mean is maybe you should look into the possibility that your issue isn’t actually with God himself but with certain beliefs about him — you know, flawed ways of explaining him. Maybe you have misjudged God. Maybe he isn’t this way at all.”

“But the Bible says that God hates us and is going to send most of us to hell,” I said, swallowing down tears.

“Does it?”

In the first few lines of Traveling Mercies, author Anne Lamott writes, “My coming to faith did not start with a leap but rather a series of staggers from what seemed like one safe place to another. Like lily pads, round and green, these places summoned and then held me up while I grew. Each prepared me for the next leaf on which I would land, and in this way I moved across the swamp of doubt and fear.”10

My return to faith happened in much the same way, and this conversation with Dan represented the first little lily pad in my own journey across the swamp of doubt and fear. In the end, the same question that frightened and intimidated me as a child provided the clearest way out: What if I’m wrong? It was a question loaded with uncertainty, possibility, and hope, and it was a question to which I often would return. To be wrong about God is the condition of humanity, for better or for worse. Sometimes it lures us into questioning God; sometimes it summons us to give him another chance. After I’d thought for so many years that good Christians are always ready with an answer, it was a question that eventually drew me back to belief.

In the end, it was doubt that saved my faith.

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