Building Faith Series: #1 Challenges

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Welcome! If you're just joining me, we're going to have a chat about faith getting turned upside down and I want to share a bit about my process as I go through a rebuilding of my faith. I'm very much in process, and learning as I go. I loved the stories some of you sent me to share that you're in a similar situation with faith. 

It's hard to know exactly what triggered my faith to have a crisis in the last couple of years. It has been building up for awhile. 

About 10 years ago or so, I remember feeling overwhelmed with doubt. Mostly it was doubt about the Bible. Like, an ark? really? Every animal on it in pairs? Or how did every person in this world come from one pair of humans? How did different cultures form and get to different continents? I couldn't even begin to go there with dinosaurs and fossils. I just had question after question and it seemed incredulous to me that the Bible could be true. I finally confessed these thoughts to my amazing husband, and he was so supportive. He suggested maybe my faith was maturing and it was time for me to get some meat on my faith. I thought he had a good point, and it just so happened that an apologetics university class was being hosted at my church for a weekend. I audited the course while my boys stayed home. It was interesting and eye opening - lots about ways to interpret the Bible, ways that religious people had been really sure about science being wrong, based on the Bible (e.g the heavens being above the earth in the Psalms led people to support flat earth theories), but mostly it just left me with many more questions. Also an inordinate amount of time was spent on the professor's strong belief that animals had souls, kind of a pet project of his, if you know what I mean. LOL

The thing that kept me holding on to faith was nature, actually. I remember looking at the flowers in my back yard and being amazed at their intricacy and beauty, and in my heart I just believed that it couldn't be chance - it had to be designed by someone or something. The seasons were changing and everything was woven together in harmony around me in nature. And to me, that was proof that God existed. That didn't give me answers about the Bible, but I decided that if I was going to believe God, I was going to believe God, whether it made sense or not, but hold on loosely to some of the wackier things, knowing that God and I at least had nature and each other. 

Since then, God and I have been hanging out in sort of an on edge interaction overall. I don't ask too many questions and I hope he doesn't either.  I am thankful to God and I am kind to others and learning to be kind to myself, and that's kind of where I've been hanging out. God's love has been really meaningful to me in this time. However, the fragile tower was being threatened by some big challenges.

Some of the topics that have been chipping away at my faith have been the way the church has treated the LGBTQ community, the residential schools and what they represent about a white European faith community (also the racism inherent in all of those discussions), the patriarchy - the ways the traditional church has elevated men beyond what Jesus ever modelled or did and the ways that has been a detriment to almost all levels of society, mission work/evangelism mindsets, challenges with the Bible itself, and the perfectionism/earning salvation approaches to faith. For a start, ha! What other topics do we need to cover here? What topics chip away or challenge at your traditional faith? Let's get them out in the open and let God sift through some of our stuff.

As you can see, I'm laying it all out here. For me, on the heels of the mental health crisis inherent in the pandemic, a crushing revelation hit me out of nowhere and the wave took with it all my trust and faith. I clicked on a link about Ravi Z who had recently passed away. The stories to follow were the straw that tore it all down for me. All of it. I remember thinking, 'OK, that's it, everything's on the table', and I'm only picking back up what is absolutely true, what is absolutely a rock to stand on, what is absolutely what God is actually about. 

And here we are. Maybe that means we start with the patriarchy. And the Bible. Stay tuned. 

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