We often think of doubt as something negative, maybe as a weakness or a lack of certainty. If we’re doubting our beliefs and especially if they’re wrapped up in our identity, it can be scary, yet doubt can actually be a positive thing. So how can we have a healthy relationship with doubt?
We’re going to cover this in three main points. Number one, we’re going to talk about viewing doubt as either good or bad. Number two, we’re going to talk about courage to doubt faith. And third, we’re going to talk about courage to doubt ourselves.
Is Doubt Good or Bad?
There are positive aspects to doubt. Doubt can help us avoid acting on every passing idea, which can prevent us from participating in certain types of risk. So, the fear can protect us and prevent us from doing really dumb things. And it does cause us to think critically and not settle for the status quo. I don’t believe everything that someone says. It causes me to make decisions for myself. I think there’s some of my upbringing with that. Because I wasn’t allowed to doubt and speak the truth or ask questions or whatever, now I’ve got my fist waving in the air. Yeah, take that society. I’m not going to believe anything you guys say. I am going to find it out for myself. I love that and I hope my child is like that. I hope more people are like that.
There’s a really healthy side of doubt that is about critical thinking: I’m not ready to believe this yet. I need more evidence. I’d like more information about that. It can cause us to question in a really healthy way and get deeper into a subject, a topic, a viewpoint, especially if it challenges a deep seated conviction. Often we need even more information or conversation or dialogue about it or just a sense of personal conviction. So doubt can really be a beautiful tool.
For me, being brought up a Christian, it was like: You never doubt. You should never doubt. And so it kept me stunted a little bit. I was afraid to ask questions and I was afraid to dig in deeper. There is a big difference between doubt and skepticism. Doubt is defined as something that’s more temporary, passing. I would say it’s more unsure. Skepticism is more of a long-term kind of position or view of things. That is, you’re critical, you’re skeptic. It’s different than being unsure. It’s almost anti-whatever-the-answer-might-be—you’re just cynical.
We are surrounded in our culture right now with people deconstructing their beliefs. That’s not what we’re talking about here. What we’re talking about is seeing how doubt can serve us in not knowing for ourselves. Skepticism doesn’t carry a lot of hope for me in it, whereas doubt does. It feels like there’s hope and it’s okay. I feel like the one phrase that kills doubt for our kids, maybe for us growing up, is “Because I said so.” It kills curiosity, it kills the ability to critically think, to make decisions, to ask the questions. It feels very dangerous to me because “I said so” for a lot of reasons. Obviously there are times your kid’s doing something dangerous: “No, because I said so—get down off that ledge.” I think skepticism is way more of a persistent attitude of questioning the validity of something rather than just being unsure. And to your point, I can remember my parents using “Because I said so” all the time. And what happened as a result of that is I never went to my parents with questions, ever. It was black or white. And while there are things in life that are black and white, having the courage to embrace doubt as a tool is why we wanted to bring this front and center and discuss it. It is not necessarily a good or bad thing. Either one of them can certainly breed things that are unhealthy, but doubt is something that can really serve us.
What does it look like to have courage to doubt our faith?
Doubt is the beginning of wisdom. I think the thing about doubt is it allows us the opportunity to really explore what we really think or believe about something. And so if we don’t let ourselves enter into that process, we won’t reach our own deep-seated convictions or conclusions or even certainties about what we believe. And that’s why I think the phrase “Because I said so” can really short circuit that process for us. It teaches us not to do that process for ourselves of critically thinking, examining things, letting our fears come to the surface. Often our doubt reveals some of our deepest fears and our need to trust something bigger or more sure than our question. And so many times I think I was really fortunate having grown up in a really large family where my parents were not Christians before a certain point in life. They became Christians as adults and they taught each of us to never exchange our judgment. We were taught to ask questions. My dad would say things like, “Don’t check your brain at the door, Amber.” When we’d go into church, they would say, “You can ask your teachers questions as long as you do it respectfully.” If they got it wrong and you wanted to question something, they encouraged us to have questions and I’m a big questions person to this day. I don’t see it as a challenge to someone’s authority. I see it as a need to honor something in me that I’m curious about. And so it’s an appetite of trying to seek out the truth.
Doubt is not disbelief, denial or rejection. It’s not refuting anything. I have a lot of baggage here. The idea of doubting my faith feels so scary. Like the moment I question God or what I believe, I’m going straight to hell. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that when Thomas said, “I’m not going to believe unless I put my fingers in the nail holes,” Jesus showed up and didn’t actually tell Thomas, “Well how stupid of you.” He said, “Come see for yourself. Put your fingers in my hands.” He didn’t chastise. He did say at the end of that, “You believe because you’ve seen me.” So there’s a side to it where there are some things that we’re not going to know this side of eternity for sure. And we have to have faith. And that’s why I’ve wrestled with this idea that doubt and faith can coexist. I think the answer is yes. And that’s what we’re trying to talk about here, but that is so uncomfortable for me.
It is hard and it can be scary for sure, but I think about it without doubt—is there any such thing as faith? We are taking a leap to trust. And that trust can be scary, but if we were 100% sure, there wouldn’t be such a thing as faith; we would just know. We would just absolutely know. And so it can be that faith cannot exist unless there’s doubt. It requires doubt in order to have faith. And so this idea of wanting some assurance—if our kids come to us and are unsure about something, they need to hear that you’re going to be there and love them or whatever. My wrestling in my faith walk has been so invigorating and I’ve grown more. I started going into this home church and it was revolutionary to me. And this is just a group of people that got together and had dinner and then just wrestled with things. It was all biblically based and it felt like a safe enough place for us to explore our doubts or questions. One of the topics was “Who gets into heaven?” Is it the thief on the cross that just says, “Hey, remember me when you come into paradise?” Or is it the one that Jesus told, “Sell everything that you’ve got and follow me”? There’s different examples of people coming into heaven and moving in that direction, but the fact that we were able to sit in this room and wrestle with things [was revolutionary].
And we leave room for God, we leave room for him to show himself. And I think about the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel, wrestling with God. He wrestles all night, finally, God gets up, he needs to go. Jacob’s like “Don’t leave without a blessing” and he cripples him, which is quite the blessing. But Jesus says to him, “Tonight, your name is going to be changed from Jacob to Israel, meaning you were striving, you were wrestling with God and you prevailed.” So to me, it’s in struggle we are transformed; our identity is transformed because we struggle with things. So in the same way Jacob’s name was changed to Israel, part of the solo season is in this time of struggle, and we can be transformed.
And I think that’s so key as we draw close to God with our questions and begin to explore and literally wrestle and connect with him even greater in our doubt. He has that opportunity to become so real and present to us in a different way that he never could if we just avoided it. Doubt can reveal conflicting messages. We believe so that we can then bring them to God and test and taste and see, “Lord, is this true? What can you tell me about this?” Ask, seek, knock. Going repeatedly to God is a way to have our questions responded to and doubt reveals our humanity. We are not God and we won’t always know. We won’t walk away with an answer. And that’s where it can be the beginning of wisdom. I am not God. God is God. And we can find a certain peace and trust because we need something greater than ourselves. If I could figure everything out, I wouldn’t need a higher power. That’s the thing—I think (especially those of us raised in the church) want to be apologist and dogmatic about everything. But I think the beautiful thing about doubt is it deepens our faith. It can motivate us to seek answers to our questions. And I also think it takes us into this understanding of humility. It reminds us of our limitations and the mystery of God’s nature. It fosters humility, recognizing that we will never, ever this side of eternity, completely comprehend the divine. It gives room for humility not only in ourselves and before God, but also humility to others and not using our faith as a weapon—but saying, “You know what? Our appetite for wanting to learn more is inherent in us and that’s not a bad thing.” And letting each person be on their own journey in that. The best thing that we can do, especially those of us who have really embraced this whole idea of doubt and wrestled with God, is we’re able to show up more authentically, not only with God but with other people and allowing them to be who they are, where they are. I don’t feel it is my job to convert someone, to shame them for not believing the way I believe or thinking the way I think about my relationship with God. I don’t need other people to understand my relationship with God. I am protective over my relationship with God and I’m very firm and solid in where I am, but I don’t need anybody else to affirm that and I don’t need anybody else to get on board with it and believe what I believe.
There has been so much more healing in my life in that regard where I’ve been able to even sit with you and ask questions and have doubts and confess those doubts and say, “Hey, I’m really struggling with this.” And in the home church, even when I couldn’t go, you shared the things you guys were discussing and we would have deep conversations about it. And it was in that confession time of like, “I don’t know what that is, what that means if I believe that, if I don’t believe it.” There was just so much healing in that. And so we’ve all been reading this book, “Living Fearless” by Jamie Winship. He’s going to come on the podcast in a couple of weeks.
And I wanted to read a quote from his book: “We grew up thinking confession was just telling everyone and God that we’re sorry about stuff, but “I’m sorry” doesn’t lead to transformation. Confession is telling God the truth about what you really believe about him, yourself and others. It’s the greatest act, a sacrament. God loves honest confession. Confession is the beginning of genuine transformation. If you don’t tell God your truth, how can he enlighten your reality with his truth?”
Confession in its root means truth, telling the truth about what’s going on. And I think for a couple of reasons, God reveals himself in moments of our vulnerability and it allows us to understand making ourselves vulnerable. When I embrace truth telling, even if I’m telling God that I’m not super happy about the things that are happening in my life right now, he wants that. He’s big enough for that. Confessing what’s inside is way beyond apology or way beyond forgiveness. It’s truth telling. And the more I’ve stepped into that, the more my life has been transformed because I’m willing to step into those places. I was almost afraid to admit that I questioned certain things. And when I stepped in and it’s like, “Oh, the sky’s not falling, I can question this and God is big enough to answer me” that my spiritual life really started on hyperdrive. It just felt like, “God is a safe place. I can come with everything.” When you think about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: “If there’s any way for this cup to pass, please let it be, but your will be done.” To me that is a form of doubt. “Is there a way?” is being unsure but yielding. I mean that to me is true confession, using doubt as a tool to move us towards an authentic relationship with God.
I don’t know if anyone listening here is worried about your kids and their faith journey, but one of the very few things that I feel I did okay on was when my oldest was really questioning her faith. I brought them up in a Christian home. I did my best to exemplify what I believe following Christ looked like. But I can remember having a conversation and she was angry at something. “Oh dad, you always are whatever, so fundamental who knows if God’s even real?” And I remember this had to be a God-given answer because I wouldn’t have thought about this. And I said, “You know what Zoe? I’m really glad that you’re doubting because that means you are on a quest for something. You are searching for answers. And I think you are at an age now where your doubt is going to lead you to truth because my God is big enough to reveal himself. If you actually doubt, not “skeptic doubt,” but “unsure and seeking truth,” he will show himself to you. I think she thought that it would rattle my cage if she goes, “I don’t even know if God’s there. I don’t know if he’s real.” So, kind of trying to get a rise out of me. But instead it was like, “No, that’s okay. God is big enough and when you find God, it’ll be your faith, not my faith.”
And that has been the differentiator from the way I grew up and feeling so controlled—it was all about someone else’s faith. It was all about what the pastor said or the Sunday school teacher or my parents. And I had to believe what they said versus having my own experience. One of my favorite classes in high school was a Critical Thinking Class. And we studied different religions. We had different people come in and we could ask questions of them. And my youth pastor actually came in and took some really hard questions from all of us asking, “Well, this doesn’t make sense. Well, what do you say about this? What do you say about that? Well, I actually believe this. What do you think about that” And it was so liberating to have a space to ask those hard questions as a kid since I never had the space to do it before. My daughter has gone through thinking and seeking, but she’s back now to believing, praying, and it’s hers.
And you two both make me think of the quote, “A man convinced against his will is of the same opinion still and a just God doesn’t do that to us.” He lets us dialogue with him, he let Jacob wrestle with him. He lets us explore and get to know him authentically. And that increases my love for him. I want to encourage those parents out there that might be worried about their kid thinking, “Oh my gosh, they’re going to go to hell” because that’s where I went originally. But there is hope. My head went to, “Oh my gosh, you can’t turn your back on Jesus. You can’t say no to God.” But I don’t have to win this argument for God. He’s very capable of showing himself.
How can we have the courage to doubt ourselves?
We can actually use self-doubt to our own advantage. Self-doubt can actually motivate you to keep learning and growing. I can’t remember who brought it up, but someone made the suggestion that we replace the word “self-doubt” with “wonder and curiosity” and use that as a tool. So, “I wonder ____” versus “I doubt ____.” And it goes back to that whole idea of hope being woven throughout doubt, if you’re reframing it to be, “I wonder.” Giving yourself that permission to wonder and be curious is so important. Our skills and our knowledge, everything in our lives, would stagnate if we didn’t have doubt and self-doubt on what we understand to be true or not true. So it can spur us to put in more of an effort, have open and honest conversations, trigger us to go deeper and really have a more full life.
I think self-doubt can be protective. It can help me recognize that. Maybe I’m unsure. I recently wondered about my capacity. I was finishing grad school, I was completing my internship, I was continuing my role with Solo Parent, I was still a mom, I was in the process of moving. And I began to question “How much more can I do?” And guess what, it wasn’t as much as everyone else wanted me to do. And I had to really explore and examine and think, “I don’t think I can do as much.” And in that process, it helped me get to a more grounded place to honor what I wanted and needed. And maybe I could have kept doing all the things to the nth degree, but that experience of self-doubt made me think, “But what do I want to do? What’s best for me?” And it gave me the courage to push back and say, “You know what? I’m not going to do it that way. That’s not how I want to live. I want to start this process the way I want to continue it.” And I reduced my hours in my internship and it was a good decision for me, but it didn’t come without some wrestling.
I’ve recently been going through a lot of stuff personally. I have felt really overwhelmed. I haven’t taken time to self-doubt and that’s not good. I haven’t asked those questions that you’re asking about capacity. There’s a point where self-doubt would’ve really served me to go, “I think you’re burning at both ends too much all the time.” So I could use a little dose of this. The discipline of having self-doubt of yourself can be a very helpful thing. And going, “Okay, I’m not capable. I need to move in a direction where I can offload some of the stuff or I can take a break and do more self-care or whatever.” Because we’re daring and having the courage to doubt our capacity.
As you do that, it’s like going forward, it turns from something that can make you feel guilty or ashamed that you don’t have the capacity (you feel like you should be able to do more, especially for those of us who are performance-oriented), to “Actually this isn’t what I want for my life. I don’t want to burn at both ends. I want to protect myself. I want to be able to show up well in the places that God has me or for my family or whatever.” And it allows you the opportunity to live life.
I think that self-doubt can start as other people’s “shoulds” that can turn into shame. And that’s how it started for me. I thought maybe I am supposed to be doing all these things and doing them all beautifully. And I started to think, “Amber, you should be doing better.” And I began to doubt myself. And in that process of self-doubt, I really feel like God helped to use it where instead of doubting myself, I begin to doubt the voices around me in a healthy way: “Who says? Is it God that’s telling me I should be doing more? Or is he actually nudging me a different way?” And so self-doubt might be an opportunity to think, “Do I need to doubt myself or do I need to doubt some of the voices around me that are leading me down the path of should and shame?” which is almost never healthy.
It can be a double-edged sword. Self-doubt can also be a red flag that we need to pay attention to if we’re especially coming out of a solo season when you’re questioning what you’re capable of. I love the exercise that you’re talking about, Elizabeth, when replacing, “I wonder if I could do this” instead of “I doubt I could do this,” but a healthy dose of doubt or humility serves us all. We just can’t live in that place of “I just doubt I can do anything.” And because doubt is not evidence of untruth, it’s evidence of being human. It’s evidence of having questions rather than a declarative “I can’t do something.” You can’t have faith in yourself or in God or in anything unless you embrace the doubt and go, “Okay, this can drive me to a healthy place.”
It’s important to try not to experience your doubt in a vacuum. When we are doubting ourselves, our faith, what we believe, it can really begin to spiral and get really big and turn into a fear or a deep-seated cynicism that goes even beyond skepticism and leads us to a place of isolation. If doubt can propel us toward wrestling closely with God, with an idea, with another person, with ourselves, it can do the work to lead us to understand what we want, what we need, what our deepest convictions are, it can help reveal our priorities. If I care enough to doubt something, it matters to me. And so it’s worth that journey of curiosity and wonder.
I’m thinking about ourselves and our kids as we’re wrestling with doubt and having questions, curiosity, all the things we’re just talking about, but in the same way that “because I said so” is harmful towards this whole idea: “I believe you” can actually be really healing and have a safe space to land for our kids.
I just think about that idea about “I believe you” because where you are right now is what’s true for you, and that’s good and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to be there forever. And this can be same with our kids with their faith, because we all know our faith has evolved over time. And it’s been because doubt’s been allowed to happen. Same with doubting ourselves. It’s not necessarily a “hard and fast,” but “I believe you” allows for an open field of possibility. It’s not saying “I agree with you” but “I believe you. I see you. I hear you. Your experience is real, the way your life is going and your interpretation of it. I see your experience with it and I validate and affirm it.
Takeaways
- Doubt isn’t strictly good or strictly bad.
- Doubting your faith does not mean you’re denying it. In fact, greater faith can actually come out through doubt.
- Doubting yourself can often lead to greater confidence, higher motivation, and basically an overall more well-rounded perspective. Doubt can really serve us if we have the courage to step into it.
Listener Question: I’d appreciate your thoughts on having your kids apologize. I want my kids to say I’m sorry when they hurt someone or mess up. But it often feels like they’re just saying it because I’m quote “making them” or they know they’ll get into more trouble if they don’t. How do you approach apologies?
When I think about apologies, we want them to come from the heart. If they’re just rote words, they don’t mean anything and they’re not going to build a bridge of connection to the person we’ve harmed. If two siblings are fighting and one hits the other, and then we say, “Oh, you need to say I’m sorry to your brother.” And then they’re like, “But I’m not sorry.” And we’re like, “Oh, you still need to apologize,” we jump past their feelings and we jump past their anger. We jump past what may have happened and we don’t let their voice be heard. And so I really feel like instead of prompting our kids to say, “I’m sorry” quickly, I think we can prompt them to think about it and to identify what happened. “What were you feeling, what were you thinking? What did you hope might happen instead?” And invite a process of curiosity. “What do you think the other person was experiencing?” And then moving to a place of empathy, “How do you think your brother felt when you hit him?”
Maybe we ask the brother, “How did you feel when your sibling hit you?” and turn it into a conversation? And in that process, allowing it to be relational and not about performance where we honor the heart of the offender and the heart of the one who was harmed to build a bridge of connection through curiosity, through empathy, and then—from a place of empathy, maybe a place of conviction that leads to repair. Anything else is behavioral and performance-based instead of heart-based. And that serves us well into adulthood too, because we don’t want to just notice that we’ve upset someone and just automatically say, “I’m sorry” but have nothing on the backend. And I think having some trust as a parent that our kids will come around to a place of apology when we do that hard front-end work of helping them explore it, not having to jump so quickly to the end game of “I’m sorry” but letting it be messy for a while, which can feel uncomfortable.Recently, my son, who is 22, spoke harshly to me on the phone and I said, “Oh, I don’t want to be talked to that way.” And I said, “I’m going to hang up now.” And so I did, and instead of reaching back out to him or texting him or checking in, I just let him sit with it. And a day or two later, I saw him in person and he said, “Mom, I need to tell you something.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you. I was overreacting and I’m sorry.” And he meant it. He had taken the time to think it through. He had processed it, and he’d come back around. And so I think this can be an important thing, and that apology meant so much more to me than if I’d said, “You owe me an apology. That’s not okay with me. You better apologize.” The fact that he did that process meant far more to me and to our relationship and my appreciation of his growth than if I had forced an apology in that moment.
I’ll take it to a 10-year-old example too. Just recently, Jax had a friend over and I came pulling through our neighborhood and noticed that his friend was riding his scooter home, and he had this just really sad look on his face. I was like, “Hey, Tanner, what’s going on? Are you heading home?” He was like, “Yeah.” I said, “Are you okay?” He just looked upset and he said, “Yeah, I don’t think Jax wanted me there, so I’m just going to head home.” And I was like, “Okay, well, I’m really sorry. Maybe we’ll see you again later.” So I go home and Jax is sitting there and I said, “Hey, what happened just now? What happened with Tanner?” And he’s like, “I don’t know what you mean.” I said, “I just saw him on the street. He seemed pretty upset. And he said that you said something that made him feel like you didn’t want him to be there.” And I said, “If you didn’t want him to be here, if you needed space, that’s totally fine, but I’m just curious what happened. And so anyway, he explained it to me and it was a big misunderstanding. And so he immediately went to his iPad, got on and apologized and said, “I’m really sorry I didn’t make you, I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. I absolutely wanted you to be here, so if you want to come back over, let’s hang out.” And he ended up coming back over and everything was fine. But I remember earlier on asking him, “How would you feel if this happened to you?” Very early on, and I probably did the whole, “You need to say ‘I’m sorry’ kind of thing.” But I do remember there being a period of time where that was a part of our practice: “How would you feel?” I didn’t even have to tell him to tell Tanner, “I’m sorry.” I didn’t have to ask him to do that. He went and did it himself. I could tell he felt guilty. He didn’t want his friend to feel that way. And so he apologized and that was all fine. If you practice it and sit in that and don’t force it, I think they do come around eventually.
So instead of focusing on apology, focus on the word “repair.” I have felt my relationships in general go deeper after conflict or after something. If repair has been done in a healthy way because it’s acknowledging humility, “I let you down,” it can actually absolutely transform your relationships. So in helping our kids understand the responsibility of repair, apology can be a part of that. Empathy is definitely a part of that. But instead of focusing on apologizing, it’s your responsibility to talk about the value of repair more than apology.
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