Wonder Lost

What you believe is really important. You can have correct theology and correct doctrines, can have success, can be blessed, and yet still miss out something. You can be right and still be wrong.

You need wonder and study, rigor and revelation, an integration of both the head and the heart. To have the facts and yet still be somebody who wakes up each morning and asks, “what is today going to bring?”

I like wonder. I like believing. Maybe that’s why I like magic. Growing up, Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood of Make-Believe wasn’t just a cardboard kingdom, but an actual city I planned on visiting. But eventually we grow up. We search for truth, wisdom, and certainty, all the while leaving wonder by the wayside.We are losing wonder.

We are losing doubt.

And we are paying a price for it.

I have attended many church services and read many books where words like evidence, certainty, and proof were the motivation for their existence.

It feels like Christians have spent millions of dollars and hours preparing a generation to have an answer for every question. We built universities, trained professors, put on Apologetics conferences, and taught children to memorize answers for when they would inevitably be attacked by an unbelieving world.

In chasing after certainty, I lost my faith. I don’t mean in a dramatic, walked away from God sort of way, but a literal inability to believe in things I could not see or fully understand. Being a Christian meant having the correct worldview and following Jesus meant having an explanation for every skeptic, myself included.

Faith became synonymous with certainty. This sounded good but felt wrong. I remember hearing Richard Rohr talk about this once. He said,

“My scientist friends have come up with things like ‘principles of uncertainty’ and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of ‘faith’! How strange that the very word ‘faith’ has come to mean its exact opposite.”

There is a beautiful story in the Bible where the father of a sick boy approaches Jesus and asks him to heal his son. I can imagine the father in this situation acting like most of us would when we find ourselves at the end of our ropes, having tried everything we can on our own, hearing of a man who can supposedly heal sick people. Tired, afraid, and desperate, the father found Jesus and asked him to save his son. To which Jesus said, everything is possible if you have faith.

The father replied, I do have faith, but I also have doubt.

The father didn’t have the answers. He wasn’t even sure if Jesus could help. But his faith and his doubt brought him to Jesus. His faith and his doubt brought him to a place to find healing for his son.