The One Question Underneath All Your Questions About Faith

I had a lot of questions.

I had questions about suffering. About the parts of the Bible I couldn't reconcile. About the church, about prayer, about why the evidence seemed to point different directions depending on who was doing the pointing. I had questions that had been sitting in the back of my head for years, and a few that I had never said out loud to anyone.

And all of them felt real. Because they were.

But somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started to notice something.

I've been thinking about Saturday.

Not this Saturday specifically. The original one. The one between the crucifixion and the resurrection. The one nobody talks about because nothing happened — at least not anything anyone could see.

Jesus was dead. The disciples were scattered. The women who had followed him were sitting somewhere trying to figure out what to do with their grief. Everything they had spent three years building their lives around had just fallen apart in public, in the most brutal way possible.

And they just had to sit in it. For a whole day. Not knowing what was coming. Not knowing there was anything coming at all.

I think about that day a lot more than I talk about it.

I want to be upfront about something before we get into this.

I did not come to the resurrection as a believer looking for reassurance. I came to it as someone who was done pretending, done performing, and honestly done with a faith that couldn't hold up to honest scrutiny. I wanted to find the crack in the foundation. The thing that would make it all fall apart cleanly so I could move on.

I'm an engineer by training. I think in systems. I think in load-bearing structures and what happens when a key component fails. I don't do well with "just trust it." I need to know what it's actually resting on.

So I looked.

Most of us know what it's like to want something to be true and still not be sure it is.

You've heard a story that sounds almost too good. You've felt something pull you toward it. But certainty never quite showed up. And so you've stayed in this in-between place, not fully in, not fully out, just carrying the question around like you're not sure what to do with it.

I think about Peter a lot when I think about that feeling.

I spent years treating my doubts like a symptom.

Like if I had enough questions about God, about faith, about whether any of this was real, that meant something was broken in me. A sign I wasn't faithful enough, or committed enough, or maybe just not cut out for this whole thing.

So I developed a pretty solid strategy for handling them.

I ignored them.

I stayed busy. I served. I showed up on Sunday. I sang the songs. I kept my head down and figured that if I just kept moving, the questions would eventually lose interest and leave me alone.

Here's the thing about that strategy: it doesn't work.