I’m a Christian author and speaker. But I admit doubt is a mosquito I can never quite kill

Last week I got mugged. It was unexpected, shocking and brutal. And just because the mugging was mental rather than physical didn’t make it any less devastating.

I was mugged by a moment of overwhelming doubt. Perhaps that’s happened to you. It doesn’t always come as a result of a crisis, a season of intellectual wrestling or during a conversation with an atheist who skilfully undercuts our reasons for faith. It can just appear out of nowhere, a thug who steps out of a side alley as we trundle along the path of faith.

It happened after I heard of the death of a distant friend. He had battled illness with great courage, and when he finally received a terminal diagnosis, he calmly prepared, talking of how much he was looking forward to being with Jesus. His eyes were bright with the anticipation of heaven. I didn’t doubt his sincerity, but when I heard that he was finally gone, I suddenly felt a fear that his (and our) whole faith construct was implausible and empty: was he really revelling in glory – or just dead?

When I first became a Christian, I thought that ministers never wrestled with doubt. They all seemed so holy – and so very certain. I didn’t realise that their vocational choice doesn’t guarantee a doubt-free existence – which can be especially awkward for leaders. It’s hard to fulfil one’s duties as a minister of the gospel while wondering if what we boldly proclaim as truth is actually true at all…(“Sorry, church, but I’m going through an atheistic phase…any chance of a couple of weeks off?”)

Doubt is a mosquito that I can never quite kill, and if past performance is anything to go by, I never will successfully swat it this side of the New Jerusalem. Most of the time, doubt rumbles rather than roars, the vaguest trembling of the ground that I stand on; distant, irritating, troubling even, but not turbulent enough to create an earthquake that Richter would be interested in. I don’t lose my faith. I just mislay it occasionally.

There’s no magic conclusion here, no slick recipe to banish doubt for good. Just the realisation that most of us suffer from it once in a while. For me, when the shadow of doubt falls over my soul and faith seems absurd, I’ve found it helpful to look back and remember some of the wonderful things that God has done in my Christian journey. My life has been peppered with amazing provision and answers to prayer. I’ve come to believe that God did some rather spectacular things for me, not because of my great faith, but because of my lack of it. Without some serious interventions, perhaps I might have given up.

How often we remember what we should forget and forget what we should remember. Surely that’s why those Old Testament pilgrims were told to build altars and pillars, prioritise disruptive feasts and festivals, and share their ancient stories with their children, so that in rehearsing and remembering, faith would be rekindled. We are called to gather, share bread and wine and recall the great event wrought for us all: the cross and vacant tomb.

One day, we’ll see Jesus face to face, and life in the twilight zone of believing will be over forever – and what joy that will be. In the meantime, we live on the spiritual dark side of the moon, his face sometimes made distant and blurred by flesh, by life, by busyness, by fear. If we sometimes doubt, it doesn’t make us grade ‘C’ Christians, or hapless pagans.

It just means that he is yet to come, and that we’re not dead yet.