What If Your Questions Aren't a Problem to Fix?
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.
Questions don't leave. They go underground. And I've come to believe that questions underground are way more dangerous than questions out in the open, because at least when they're out in the open, you can actually do something with them.
The Story We Tell Ourselves About Doubt
There's this unspoken belief in a lot of church spaces, and honestly in a lot of people's heads, that doubt is the opposite of faith.
Like faith is this clean, settled thing, and doubt is the thing that threatens it. So you protect your faith by keeping doubt out. You don't ask the hard questions. You don't say the thing out loud. You just trust, and move on, and hope the questions don't catch up to you.
I get why we do that. It feels safer. Faith feels fragile, and doubt feels like a threat.
But I think we've gotten the story wrong.
Because here's what I've actually seen: the people who ask the hardest questions out loud, who say "I don't know if I believe this anymore" or "I can't reconcile this part of my faith with what I've experienced," those people often end up with something more solid than the people who never asked at all.
And the people who push it all underground? They often end up walking away from faith entirely. Not because they asked too many questions, but because they were never given a safe place to ask them.
What Thomas Actually Teaches Us
There's a moment in the Bible that I think gets misread almost every time we look at it.
After the resurrection, Jesus appears to his disciples. But Thomas isn't there. And when the other disciples tell him what happened, "We've seen Jesus. He's alive," Thomas says something a lot of us have thought but would never say in a church building.
"Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were... I will not believe."
We've spent centuries calling him Doubting Thomas, like doubt is the worst thing he could have done. Like the right move would have been to just go along with it. Take their word for it. Suppress the part of him that needed to know for himself.
But look at what Jesus does when he shows up again.
He doesn't scold Thomas. He doesn't tell him his doubt disqualified him. He walks right up to him and says, "Put your finger here. See my hands. Stop doubting and believe."
Jesus met him exactly where he was.
He didn't ask Thomas to pretend. He didn't ask him to perform certainty he didn't have. He showed up in the middle of the doubt and gave Thomas what he actually needed.
That tells me something about the kind of God we're dealing with. A God who is not threatened by your questions. A God who can actually handle what you're carrying.
Two Years of Taking It Apart
I told you at the beginning that I've spent two years taking things apart.
I won't get into all of it here, but there was a season in my life where I couldn't keep pretending I had it together. I had questions I'd been carrying for years, and they were getting heavier, not lighter.
So I finally started asking them.
And I want to be honest with you: it wasn't comfortable. Saying some of those things out loud for the first time felt dangerous. It felt like I was risking something. Like if I admitted I wasn't sure, the whole thing might come apart.
What actually happened was the opposite.
Not because I got clean, easy answers to every question. I didn't. Some things I'm still sitting with. But because I stopped treating my questions like an emergency and started treating them like an invitation.
An invitation to go deeper. To be honest. To actually work out what I believe and why I believe it, instead of just inheriting a set of answers I never examined.
What came out the other side felt a lot more like real faith than what I had going in.
Your Questions Aren't the Enemy
I want to say this as clearly as I can, because I think a lot of people need to hear it:
Your questions are not a sign that you're losing your faith.
They might actually be a sign that your faith is growing.
Because real faith, the kind that holds up when life gets hard, isn't built on certainty. It's built on honest engagement. It's built by people who brought their real selves to God and found out he could actually handle it.
The question isn't whether you have doubts. The question is what you do with them.
You can push them down, stay busy, keep moving, and hope they don't catch up with you.
Or you can bring them out into the open.
You Don't Have to Have It Together to Show Up
At Next Level, we're not going to ask you to have everything figured out before you walk in the door. That's not who we are. We don't assume you've got your faith all together, because none of us do.
We're just a church that thinks honest questions are worth asking out loud. Together.
If you've been carrying something you've never said out loud, come as you are. Any Sunday is a good Sunday to start.
