Worth Fighting For by John Pavlovitz

Author:John Pavlovitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646983759
Publisher: Presbyterian Publishing

Truth: Ego is nonpartisan and universal.

Question: Where do you notice that you are in danger of drifting into self-righteousness or arrogance?

Strategy: Brainstorm a short, practical list of humility helpers and reminders to check your own ego.

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU’RE LOSING YOUR FAITH

“I just don’t know if I believe anymore—and I don’t know what to do about it.”

I hear words like these every single day from people from every corner of the planet, from every strand of the Christian tradition, from every conceivable segment of society. They are once-religious people who for any number of reasons are now finding the very ground of faith eroding beneath their feet—and they are panicking. And this fear is understandable. After all, this is terrifying stuff to endure. It’s one thing to question the institutional church or to poke holes in the religious systems we’ve put in place or even to critique the Bible and how we interpret it. Those are all sustainable losses. We can endure such things, experience these crises, and still hold a steady confidence in the belief that God is and that God is good. Even if on some days, those are all that remain of our fragile faith narrative, they can be enough.

But what do you do when, with all the sleepless wrestling and the furrowed-browed prayers and the ceaseless questions and the best-intended efforts, even that seems out of reach? What happens when the very reality of God (or of a God who is good) seems too much for you to claim ownership of? How do you keep going while in the middle of a full-blown spiritual collapse? It often isn’t a matter of just being more determined or more “religious.” Most of the time people have reached these desperate moments despite continually reading the Bible and praying and volunteering and attending church services and trying to believe. They haven’t refrained from those disciplines. In fact, they often are as devout and engaged as ever, only these pursuits no longer yield the clarity and confidence and comfort they once did.

Many people in that barren spiritual dryness also carry the crushing guilt of failure. They are grieving deeply, feeling helpless to get back what they’ve lost, and angry at themselves for not being faithful enough to conjure up belief that used to come as a simple given. (And they’re often pretty ticked off at God too.) If you’re in that place right now, I won’t pretend there’s any easy way out or a simple path back to faith. I can’t even promise that you’ll ever find your way back, at least not to what you used to call belief. It may be a very different experience in the future.

So, what can you do right now? It might be prayer or reading the Bible or finding a new church—but maybe it’s something else. Maybe it’s about asking yourself what you still know to be true: about the goodness of people, the causes that matter to you, or the gifts you’ve been given.

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