I don't love admitting this in writing, but here it is: some mornings my faith feels like a habit I'm maintaining more than a conviction I'm certain of. Not always. Most days it's solid ground under my feet, the same ground it's been for decades. But there are stretches — after watching a good man at Gateway Mission relapse for the fourth time, after a season of unanswered prayer that had nothing dramatic about it, just silence — where I've caught myself wondering whether I believe what I've spent forty years teaching other people to believe, or whether I've just gotten extremely good at sounding like I do.
At twenty-five, my doubts were mostly intellectual. Could a good God allow suffering. Does the math of the universe actually point to a Creator. Interesting questions, argued at a comfortable distance. At sixty-something, my doubts are different animals entirely. They're not abstract anymore. They're built out of specific, named losses — people I prayed for who didn't get better, prayers I've prayed for decades that still haven't been answered, and a slowly dawning awareness of how much of my early certainty was actually just youth, energy, and not yet having been disappointed enough times to know better.
The Tradition I Wish I'd Found Sooner
For most of my ministry I treated doubt as something to manage privately and resolve quickly, ideally before anyone noticed. It took me embarrassingly long to discover that some of the deepest figures in the Christian tradition treated it as something else entirely — not a malfunction to fix, but a stage nearly every serious faith eventually passes through. St. John of the Cross, writing from a Spanish prison cell in the sixteenth century, called it the dark night of the soul: a season where the felt presence of God withdraws, not as punishment, but as an invitation to a faith that no longer depends on feeling anything at all. The Desert Fathers, thirteen centuries earlier, described something similar under a different name — acedia, a spiritual weariness that looks from the outside like doubt and laziness, and from the inside is often the soul being stretched past what its previous certainties could hold.
What both traditions insist on, and what took me decades to actually believe, is that the dark night isn't evidence of a faith that's failing. It's frequently evidence of a faith that's maturing past the point where it needs constant emotional confirmation to keep functioning.
"Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" — Mark 9:24 (ESV)
I used to read that verse as a strange contradiction — how can belief and unbelief occupy the same sentence, spoken by the same man, in the same breath? Now I think it's the most honest sentence in the Gospels. The father wasn't lying in either half. He believed, genuinely, and he also didn't, genuinely, and Jesus didn't ask him to resolve the contradiction before helping his son. He just met him in it.
What the Research Says About Why This Happens
Psychologists studying religious development have a useful framework here: James Fowler's stages of faith describe a common and largely predictable movement from an early, inherited faith built on the authority of parents and institutions, through a stage of critical examination and doubt, toward what Fowler calls a "conjunctive faith" — one that holds paradox, uncertainty, and mystery without needing them resolved to remain stable. The doubt in the middle isn't a detour from that maturity. Fowler's research suggests it's usually the mechanism by which it happens. People who never pass through a serious questioning stage tend to hold a more brittle, second-hand faith; the ones who come out the other side of real doubt tend to hold something sturdier, precisely because it survived contact with the hard questions instead of avoiding them.
Let's Be Honest About the Part Nobody Says From the Pulpit
Here's what I don't love saying, especially as someone who's stood in a pulpit: pastors are some of the least likely people to admit doubt out loud, precisely because we're the ones supposed to have the answers. I've sat across from grieving families and spoken with a confidence I didn't always fully feel that day, because that's what the moment seemed to require. I'm not sure that was wrong, exactly — sometimes you carry weight for other people that you're not fully carrying for yourself yet. But I regret how long I let people believe my own faith never wavered, because it let them believe theirs shouldn't either.
What I Actually Do With It Now
I say the doubt out loud to one or two trusted people, instead of managing it alone. Silence turns doubt into shame. Speaking it plainly, to someone who won't panic, usually turns it back into just a hard question.
I keep showing up to the practices even when the feeling is absent. Prayer, Scripture, the Examen — not because the feeling of God's presence is there every time, but because the practice itself has carried more of my faith over four decades than any single emotional experience ever did.
I let the doubt ask its actual question instead of rushing past it. "Why didn't this prayer get answered" deserves an honest sitting-with, not a reflexive Bible verse deployed to make the discomfort go away faster.
I'm not going to tell you my doubt resolved into some tidier, permanent certainty, because it hasn't, and I no longer expect it to. What I can tell you is that forty years in, the doubt itself has stopped scaring me. It feels less like evidence my faith is failing and more like evidence it's still alive enough to keep asking questions.
What's the question about your own faith you've been managing privately instead of asking out loud to someone who could actually sit with you in it?