HELP!

“Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) Boy, does that express what many of us feel. There is that awful feeling, when in unguarded moments you look at the whole  faith thing with your scholarly mind, that the entire structure is a fantasy, that the available evidence suggests that in all probability we wink out like a blown candle at the moment of death, that the universe exists in space and time but has no meaning whatsoever, that the Old Testament proposes to us a deity we would not want to know much less worship, that the New Testament pays tribute to an astonishingly admirable man around whom have been built a number of untenable theories, and that the whole thing is a tottering card-house of wishful thinking.

Right. Then what? You can argue against this: I have heard arguments for the Defence that are not entirely fanciful, though none of them would hold up in a scholarly, much less a scientific, world. (On the other hand, the so-called “scientific” arguments of the Ditchkins school are mere scientism and do not hold up in a truly scientific world either.)

Something I read recently helped me through this, at least for the time being. Whether you feel God’s presence, or His answer to your prayer, is unimportant. The point is that He is answering it whether you feel it or not. He is present whether you feel Him or not. He loves you, and wants to come and live with you, whether you feel it or not. At the moments when you feel it’s all a load of codswallop, He hears you thinking and feels a rueful sympathy, saying to Himself, “poor So-and-So: I do understand how (s)he feels – but (s)he will get over it in time, if I hang in there.”

A bit of us knows this: so the best we can do is be totally honest when talking to Him, and saying, like the father of the epileptic, “Lord, I believe: help thou mine unbelief.” And I rather suspect He will.