Magnifying Doubt: The Skeptic
Magnify Doubt – The Skeptic
We say that we want to magnify God’s grace in Jesus Christ to the skeptic in our vision statement. When we talk about the skeptic we are not talking about some specific kind of person that we’ve deemed part of an outgroup…we’re the believers and they’re the doubters over there. We’re not singling out atheists or agnostics or people of other faiths. They certainly are skeptics, but so are we. We use the categories of the skeptic and wounded in our vision statement because in our experience they include everyone. (You can read Kate’s excellent description of wounded here.)
Skepticism and woundedness are the great equalizers. They are the direct result of our brokenness, our “mismanagement of love,” as Robert Farrar Capon wrote (Kingdom, Grace, and Judgment 214). (You can read more about our problem with love here.) We do not love the way that we should, which results in wounds…us wounding others and being wounded by others. And those wounds result in skepticism. We have trust issues because the people that we were supposed to be able to trust hurt us or betrayed that trust. A negligent parent. An abusive spouse. A mean older sibling. A bad boss. A manipulative priest or pastor. A corrupt politician. An abusive coach. On and on the list could go. We have a legitimate need for love and relationship, and when it doesn’t get met we grow skeptical and sometimes outright hostile toward the idea of being loved. We defend ourselves against it. It doesn’t take long for us to learn this either. Infants can tell when they are not getting their need for love met, and they quickly want to get away from the person who hurt them. Watch this fascinating clip below on the “Still Face Experiment.”
The irony of this skepticism is that it usually results in us perpetuating the problem. In 12 Step recovery rooms, they have a simple phrase: “hurt people, hurt people.” It is a statement of compassion and understanding that we stand in a long line of broken people who have suffered at the hands of others, people that we were supposed to be able to trust, and our wounds have caused us to hurt others who have tried to trust us too. None of us live in a vacuum. We are not islands (thanks Paul Simon). Our pain has context, as does the pain we have caused. This does not excuse our responsibility, rather it creates compassion for ourselves and for others. Hurt people, hurt people.
The point of all of this is to say that our doubts are often for good reason. There is a story behind them. Christians and non-Christians alike have gone through situations that have caused them to question: Is God real? Does he really love me? Does he even care? What is the point of any of this? I know I have asked those questions many times throughout my life. More often than not, we spend so much of our time simply trying to cope, to “keep calm and carry on” in some kind of false stoicism. We think that denying or ignoring our pain and building up strong defenses against ever being hurt again is the answer. We are survivors after all. Many of us have survived through years of disappointment and hardship to become the people we are, and there is much to be commended there. At the same time, we also often have a lot of undigested material that unbeknownst to us is running the ship. We find ourselves strongly reacting to certain people in an unexpected way. Or we wonder why we don’t feel much at all. Or we can’t figure out why we have a string of broken relationships. Or we’re surprised at our angry outbursts toward our children or our cat or dog, etc. Whatever it may be we want to turn the volume up there. Listen to it, don’t try to cover it up or hide from it because it’s only when things are brought into the light that there is hope for healing. It’s only when we acknowledge our hurts and our fear of trust, our skepticism that love is real or possible, that we will be at all close to hearing and experiencing something new. A word from outside of us that breaks the cycle of broken trust, that meets us in our pain and loves us in our pain. A word of grace that heals.
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