Lost in Faith

In March Roy will be leading us through a series of messages the reasonability of Christianity. This subject is as near to my heart as any. I find my calling and purpose (at least presently) is most acutely focused when I’m loving those with doubts about those very reasons. Maybe that’s because I see my own struggles in their eyes when I look in their faces. Maybe it’s because I too have many frustrations about the state of the American Church. Maybe it’s because I’m a nerd.
I use the term nerd as affectionately as I can to describe the kind of people who, more than anything else, hunger for certainty and truth in their lives, and try and pursue peace of mind through the consumption and retention of information. Although I have come to realize there are more important things in life I still find myself craving those things through nearly everything I do. Because I believe that Christianity offers more clarity on the ideas of truth and certainty than any other belief system I am studying to become a Christian Apologist. I would define an apologist as a minister to those with intellectual doubts about the Christian faith. It is important to remember that an apologist is not someone who makes apologies for Christians or Christianity if you use the common definition of the word. Although I do find myself doing quite a bit of that as I try to love my classmates in the philosophy department at Northwest Missouri State University. The original meaning of the world apology meant to offer a defense for a given idea or action. Over time it has regressed to mean stating remorse over some wrong doing. However, my ever progressing journey into apologetics had humble beginnings in a rather odd place.
I live my life in a wheelchair, and as a teenager I played wheelchair basketball. I’ve always wanted to be a jock, because they’re cool, and let’s face it nerds we never were.  Although my desire to be cool has waned in recent years it led me then to miserably pathetic athletic career. However, one of the positives from this period of time in my life was the question that haunted me for many years after. The question was this: ‘If God is real why does life hurt so much?’ It was posed to me after I vomited my weak and obscure conception of the gospel all over several of my teammates one Saturday after practice. It is an important question to be asked for sure, but sadly even though I had heard the bible and stories of God my whole life I could not adequately answer his question. To make matters worse he had verbalized something I had been afraid to, and the question weighed hard on me.  It was amplified by the fact that your teenage years are ‘Your prime suffering years’ to quote Uncle Frank from Little Miss Sunshine. Have truer words ever been spoken? My teenage years saw me leading a double life for the most part because of that question ‘If God is real why does life hurt so much?’ I could not bring myself to reconcile the idea. Nor did I feel comfortable asking anyone about it for fear that the reputation I had acquired as ‘Mr. Theology’ or ‘The Bible Answer Man’ would be called into question. So I put on the metaphorical robes of a Pharisee. I was seen as one who could give answers while the answers I was giving were not personally satisfying. And I acted on my uncertainty, but only in places where my sin could not be seen by those who lived life with me regularly. I only asked my questions in front of those who were asking the same, we met and numbed our pains together on the road between tournaments.
But there is a reason Jesus says ‘No one can serve two masters’ (Luke 16:13). It truly is impossible. And during my senior year of high school I could not keep up the façade any longer. I was coming off a long weekend full of doubts and fears and the resulting escape methods common in the disabled community when I rolled into my Biology class to hear the teacher announce that we would be starting a unit on the theory of Evolution. With the help of Mr. Tim Nixon, a science teacher who will undoubtedly be very familiar to many Shoal Creeker’s, I had given speeches on the flaws in the theory in several classes previously. This is a form of apologetics which had helped to quench my doubts about the scientific validity of Christianity, but I had others. They were more philosophical in nature though I did not know that at the time.  Even though it probably would have been an excellent place for Christians to minister to the unbelieving world by politely razing questions which challenge the theory. Several of my Christian friends took a different approach. They rose from their seats in unison while one of them wrote ‘Genesis 1’ on the board in front of us. With that they all began to file out of the classroom. As one of them passed me he whispered ‘Are you with us?’ And sadly, I decided I was. As I look back it stands out as one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. Never in the New Testament do you find Jesus segregating himself from the lives of the unbelieving world in fact, he dives into them. We went to the lunch room after our protest. I was sick with my own hypocrisy. At the lunch table for the first time I confided in one of the fellow protesters. ‘What if this is all fake,’ I said. With a bit of a shocked look he said nothing. He instead reached into his backpack and pulled out a copy of The Case for Christ. ‘I think you should read this,’ he said. I did read it, and it honestly changed my life. I was so enthused by what I read that I decided I would become a journalist like the author Lee Strobel.
My collegiate journalism career was short lived. I did not know it at the time, but God had other direction for me. Although I was greatly pained by giving up a journalism career it was that pain that caused me to once again focus my life in relationship to Jesus. It was during that difficult time I took my first philosophy class with several of my friends from Campus Crusade for Christ. For my friends it was both a boring and frustrating class which they did not seem to enjoy nor want to understand. But for me I could not help but think that if Jesus were physically on this campus he would be in this classroom responding in love to the theories of his creations about the nature of the world around them.
Many of my friends will often complain to me that philosophy never gives any clear answers to the doubts that it has caused. When I consider that objection to the study of philosophy I’m reminded of Larry Crabb’s sentiments in his work The Silence of Adam:
“We like to think that there are steps we can follow for healing or that our duties to God can be laid out before us as a well-lit path we can walk along. Then things seem clear. We know what to do. We never have to leave the sphere of manageability. And we therefore never learn the dependence and trust that only grows in darkness.” p. 57
This is a beautiful image of what the God of Christianity does with our doubts when we are honest enough to admit that they exist. The answers will grow in darkness.  For some of us our doubts will take a more intellectual lean, as God has designed us to minister to those cultural objections. For others the same doubts will manifest themselves in a more personal manner. I’m of the opinion that all doubt functions as a facet of pain. It is this realization that causes my rage to subside when Jesus, and those who follow him, are frequently degraded and dismissed. I have to remember that those who do so are acting out of their own pains, as I once did, and unfortunately still do sometimes. I think it is important to remember that Jesus was always friendly toward those who were skeptical of who he was and what he came to do. It is commonly forgotten that we get possibly the most famous verse in scripture from Jesus interaction with an educated skeptic.  Jesus speaks the words later recorded in John 3:16 to the Pharisee Nicodemus upon his objection to Jesus teaching that a person must be reborn in order to have eternal life. He invites Thomas to examine the wounds in his body rather than chastise him for his pain-driven doubt. Perhaps Jesus’ most vivid endorsement to minister to those with doubts comes when he heals the son of a man who openly admits to Jesus that he has doubts as to whether He can heal him. (Mark 9:24) The father in the story says ‘I believe now help me with my disbelief.’ That’s where the skeptic’s relationship with Jesus begins in my opinion. But I must say that there seem to be fewer and fewer in the American Church today who would feel comfortable carrying that message to the skeptical community. I think this is in large part because it is more comfortable settling into the conceptions of God we have come to believe.  Except that when we do this we commit the same mistakes the Pharisee’s did. That error caused them to miss their messiah. However, maybe if we could all learn to utilize and renew our minds in accordance to the words of both Jesus and Paul (Mathew 22:37; Romans 12:2) there would be less to mock, degrade and dismiss. And maybe those people you thought would never experience the love of God would be transformed by it.  And so I sit in philosophy classrooms all day long waiting for my mind to collapse. But that’s where God put me to challenge and be challenged. Where has He put you?