THOMAS’S LETTER
Thomas wrote back with a harder question. He said the second letter had helped, but there was something underneath the flatness he had not told me about. He had started doubting not just his feelings but the whole thing — whether God was real at all, whether the Bible was true, whether he had been believing something made up. He said the doubts came at night and he could not make them go away. He said he was sorry to bring this up.
Dear Thomas,
Of course I want to write back. I am writing back right now, because I do not want you to spend another night thinking I have abandoned you for saying what you said. The things you said are serious. They are not things I can fix in a letter. But they are not things that disqualify you from being written to, or loved, or being in the family of God. You are not outside the circle for having doubted. The circle is, in my experience, more than half full of people who have doubted. We are just quieter about it than we should be.
Let me tell you something I have not told many people. When I was younger, I had a period of about eight months where I was not sure whether I believed any of it anymore. I had grown up in church. I knew the stories, the doctrines, the answers. And then, one autumn, during a hard season, the whole structure started to feel thin to me. Not wrong. Thin. Like a stage set. Like something someone had built for me to believe in, and I was standing in it, and the walls had a hollow sound when I knocked on them.
I did not tell anyone for months. I went to church. I sang the songs. I said the “amens”. And all the time, underneath, there was this quiet voice asking: what if none of this is real? What if you have just been an obedient child all these years and never actually knew the thing you thought you knew? The voice was not loud. It was worse than loud. It was patient.
I am telling you this so that when I respond to what you wrote, you understand I am not answering from a place where I have never been. I have been where you are. I know what the nights are like.
Here are three things about that place, in the hope that one of them will help.
The first: doubt is not the opposite of faith. Unbelief is the opposite of faith. Doubt is often a companion of faith rather than its enemy. Doubt is what happens when a faith held lightly comes into contact with a reality that stresses it. If the faith holds, it comes out stronger, because it has been tested.
The presence of doubt is not the problem. The greater danger is refusing to acknowledge or wrestle with it. Avoiding doubt means never truly discovering whether your beliefs have become your own or whether they simply remain the convictions of those who taught them to you. Honest questioning can be part of a healthy and maturing faith.
There is a father in the Gospel of Mark who brings his sick son to Jesus, and Jesus tells him that all things are possible to him who believes, and the father cries out: I believe; help my unbelief (Mark 9:24). That is one of the most important responses in the New Testament, and I want you to notice what happens after it.
Jesus does not rebuke the man for admitting that his faith is incomplete. The father tells the truth about himself. He believes, yet he is aware that his belief is mixed with uncertainty, fear, and lingering unbelief. Instead of hiding that reality, he places it before the very One he is learning to trust.
And Jesus responds with grace and He heals the boy. The father’s half-faith is met with full grace. The half-faith is counted as enough. Because Jesus is not waiting for us to have perfect confidence before He meets us. He is willing to be met by people whose belief is tangled up with their unbelief. If you can pray that prayer — I believe; help my unbelief, you are already inside the gospel.
The second: the doubts that come at night are not the same as the doubts that come in the day. The mind is different at night. The defences are lower. The imagination is more active. Things that look manageable at three in the afternoon look catastrophic at three in the morning. Do not trust the conclusions of your three-in-the-morning mind. They are not conclusions but feelings.
What you can do at night is not argue with the doubts. Arguing with doubts at night is like trying to wrestle a ghost — you cannot get a grip, and every move exhausts you more. What you can do instead is say one simple sentence, slowly, and then stop.
The sentence I use, and that I still use when the old voice comes back, is: Lord, have mercy. Three words.
It does not argue with anything. It just names who you are talking to and what you are asking for. Say it once. Say it again. Say it a third time, slower. Hand the night to Him with those words and let the arguing wait for daylight.
The third, and the one I most want you to hold: the question of whether God is real is not one you will answer with your mind alone. Not fully and not finally. The mind can get you to a certain place — it can look at the evidence and come to a reasonable judgement that the Christian faith is credible, not crazy. That is worth something. But the deeper question, the one you are really asking, is not finally answered by a book or an argument. It is answered by walking with Him or by trying to over a long stretch of time.
You will not be persuaded by a sermon. You might be helped by one. What will persuade you, in the end, is the accumulated experience of having talked to Him for years and having found that the talking was not nothing. It was something. It was answered, sometimes, in ways you could not have arranged.
In the end, the evidence may convince your mind that faith is reasonable, but what settles the heart is seeing the truths of the gospel confirmed over years of walking with Christ. And the problem is that you cannot make it now, because you have not had the accumulated experience yet.
So what I am asking you to do is trust me, and trust the people before me who have said the same thing: the decade will come. And at the end of it you will be able to look back at your own life and see that Someone has been with you, even in the flatness, even in the doubt, even in the nights when you were afraid of your own mind. You will see it afterward, the way Jacob saw it when he woke from the dream of the ladder and said: surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it (Genesis 28:16). He did not know it in the moment. He knew it after. The waking up was the knowing.
You are in Jacob’s place right now, Thomas. You are on the ground with a stone for a pillow, not sure what is real. And somewhere above you, though you cannot see it, there is a ladder, and at the top of it there is the God of Abraham, saying to you exactly what He said to Jacob: I am with you and will keep you wherever you go. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you (Genesis 28:15).
You will wake up. You will see.
Sleep well tonight if you can. Pray the three words if you cannot sleep.
And write back when you are ready. I am not going anywhere.
With love and with the prayer of that same father in Mark,
YD.
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