I’ve never really had a problem with God – my problem has always been with me. Being raised in a conservative Christian home by two committed parents, I soaked and marinated in the Bible and church and Sunday School. The Bible and the Christian God were never foreign to me – God and the Bible and Jesus were the philosophical and spiritual air I breathed. I was raised on stories of Noah and Abraham and David and Ruth and Moses and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Serpents and burning bushes and donkeys that spoke, seas and rivers that parted, and dead people that came back to life were the staples of my imagination. All of these stories were illustrated for us kids using flannel-graph (think of a low-tech Power Point!) I was never on the outside of Christian culture and its accompanying worldview – I never saw it as foreign or exotic or problematical or narrow-minded or anti-science or bigoted or any other of the dozens of pejoratives aimed against Christianity by her multiplied critics. Christianity was, for me, the way people should believe and the way life should be lived. Yet all wasn’t as rosy as this might make it sound. There was a mighty wrestling match going on inside of me. But it is probably different than you think.
My challenge has never really been to find the sense of Christianity, but to bring to heel the nonsense within me that resists the things of God. I’ve wrestled intellectually with the problem of evil, but I’ve never wrestled with it existentially like I’ve wrestled with my own sin and weakness and pettiness. Meaning – the problem of evil never presented a threat to my faith; my fallen desires have presented a threat to my faith. I’ve never told myself that if I can’t reconcile the reality of evil with the reality of the goodness of God, I can’t believe, in good faith. That’s never been a show-stopper for me. I’ve told myself that if I can’t reconcile the two, this doesn’t mean that a good God doesn’t exist, it just means I can’t reconcile these two things. It says nothing about God, it says something about me. More than reconciling God and evil, my challenge is reconciling my will to God’s will. I’ve never struggled with God’s will – only mine. My problem isn’t that I think God’s will is demanding, my problem is that my will is too demanding. My problem isn’t God; my problem is me.
“Contradictions” in the Bible have never kept me awake at night. The contradictions of my heart have made me lose sleep. If I don’t have a response to an alleged contradiction, I know that there are people out there smarter than me who have answered this or who will answer this. When someone says that verse A says this and verse B says that and they don’t agree, I find it more problematical when the Bible says A and my heart says B. Reconciling my heart to the Bible has been a far more soul-consuming task than reconciling the Bible to itself. A heart that truly believes in God is a heart that’s committed. My problem isn’t with God, but with commitment. I don’t wrestle with God, I wrestle with surrendering to God. I’m really not wrestling with God, I’m wrestling with my own will – or my will is wrestling with me – or my desires are wrestling with me. I’ve never really had a problem with God – my problem has always been me.
So many who struggle in their faith are told that they are wrestling with God – I wonder if this is always true. We turn our struggle into an intellectual quest which may or may not yield satisfying answers. We’ve been led to believe that if we don’t receive satisfying answers, there is a warrant to withhold our commitment to Christ. The thing is, I have questions for which I don’t have satisfying answers. This doesn’t mean that there are no satisfying answers, much less does it mean that God is unworthy to be trusted – all it means is that I don’t have satisfying answers to some of my questions. Yet locating the struggle completely in the head brings us to ignore our hearts – and this is where the real struggle is taking place. It’s interesting that scientists who hold to one particular viewpoint don’t abandon the pursuit of scientific knowledge when their viewpoint is challenged and overturned. They don’t declare that science contradicts itself and can’t be trusted. They just press ahead for a coherent solution to the problem at hand. Just because they can’t get a hold on science doesn’t mean science is a foolish pursuit. In fact, it is a noble thing to forge ahead when all is gray and the shadows are deep.
This is not to imply that all who have the same background I do don’t have an existential struggle with unanswered questions which give rise to faith-choking tensions, nor is it meant to imply that those who come from a spiritually indifferent or antagonistic background do. Many raised in the church have intellectual struggles and many who come to Christ from an unchurched background don’t. I’m just telling you my story. I know there are many (possibly even you) who have had to overcome personal wounds and fight hand-to-hand combat with philosophical objections and tunnel through intellectual cave-ins before surrendering to Jesus Christ. And I respect that. But I’ve always been on the inside. I’ve never really struggled with my head – only with my heart and my will. I don’t have problem with God – I have a problem with me. It’s possible that your real struggle isn’t with God – it’s with you.
