Doubt and faith

I’m getting into some kind of pattern in the writing of this daily blog. Patterns are not really my thing, but to be frank if I don’t ‘patternise’ (sorry) my thinking, this would never happen.

The pattern for the moment (subject to change) is that I’ll look back through photograph albums and then choose one that resonates and allows me to hang thoughs upon it.

Waves; a statement of the obvious! The photograph was taken in February this year, just before the world changed. I have never thought of waves as having a prophetic element, but perhaps this needs a re-think. My memory of the moment I took this photograph is one of overwhelming power and relentlessness; but not necessarily in a forboding way. I think I just stood and watched for some time, before I took the shot. Anyway, that’s something of the back story.

But why the heading; ‘Doubt or Faith’? Hazzarding a guess, I think we all live each moment in either one state or another. Perhaps holding both in tension at the same time. I remember having a conversation with my line -manager in the first prison I worked in. He was an avowed atheist, and we used to have occasional moments of ‘sparring’ as he called our exchanges. At one point we came to a pause and he looked at me and said…`Barrie, there’s something about you people that makes me wonder!’ We laughed and sparred a little more. I was always honest with him about doubt and faith and how we needed to hold them in tension, Sometimes there were no answers, just living with tension.

I’ll come to the point. For me there is no faith without doubt, and that is being tested in these moments in which we live. There are times when one reaches an impasse and the feeling is one that I can only imagine is like being like a rope held in tension in a tug of war match. The tension is where we can find stability in a strange way. The witness of life is that God reaches us in the most of unlikely of ways or places. Doubt is not a negative but a place on the road to faith. It’s not a steady state of bliss I’m looking for, it is the still point, which may be fleeting, but which speaks of something deeper than I know or normally access.

As always thank you taking a moment to read this blog.