I Still Believe. I Just Don't Believe That Anymore.

Chisom was halfway through a song she had known since she was seven years old when she realised she didn't believe the words she was singing. Not that she doubted them exactly. She simply couldn't locate, anywhere inside herself, the thing that used to make them feel true.

She stayed for the rest of the service. She shook hands at the door. She drove home and sat in her kitchen and thought about it for a long time. The questions that started that Sunday morning grew from small to large to the kind you cannot unknow once you have asked them.

Her community loved her and loved God genuinely, and they were frightened by the questions because they were frightened of where the questions might lead. They handed her answers too quickly, in the way you hand someone a tissue when what they actually need is a full conversation. She was not losing her faith. She was losing the version of it that had been given to her by others, the one that worked because she had not yet looked too closely at it. Underneath it, she was finding something she had to build herself, and it was harder, slower, and more hers.

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Most people know the beginning of Job. He loses everything: his children, his wealth, his health. And his friends spend thirty-odd chapters defending God and explaining Job's suffering with great sincerity. Job argues back. He does not accept their answers. He is angry, demanding, insistent that what has happened is not right and that he wants God Himself to answer for it.

At the end of the book, God speaks. And then He says something remarkable to Eliphaz, the leader of the tidy-answer group: you have not spoken what is right about me, as my servant Job has.

Job, who argued and demanded and was furious enough to refuse every easy answer he was handed. He spoke what was right. The friends who defended God politely and kept everything theologically neat did not.

God preferred the honest wrestling to the polished theology.

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In John 20, after the resurrection, Jesus appears to the disciples. Thomas is not there. When the others tell him what happened, Thomas says: unless I see the nail marks in his hands, I will not believe.

A week later, Jesus appears again, specifically for Thomas, with exactly what Thomas said he needed. He does not rebuke the demand. He shows him the wounds.

Doubt that is willing to look at the evidence is not the enemy of faith; it is sometimes the doorway to a faith that can actually hold things.

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Chisom still goes to church, though a different one now. She sits near the back. What she has is smaller than the faith she grew up with and, she thinks, more real. She stopped needing it to be certain and started needing it to be true. Most Sundays she finds that it is. The questions are still there. She has made a kind of peace with their presence, and she has noticed that God seems entirely comfortable with the arrangement.

You are not losing your faith. You may be losing the version of it that could not hold your real life. That is a different thing, and it is painful in a different way.

Bring the questions. God has been handling them for a long time without being threatened by a single one.

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Part of the Between Sundays series. Available on Spotify.