We’re sensitive to your feelings, and we’d sincerely like to help you sort them out. But if you want our honest opinion, we have the impression that your loss of faith has very little to do with a clear, rational analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the Christian worldview. It sounds more like an understandable emotional reaction to some unfortunate misunderstandings.
You say that you’ve become weary of expending the energy “to do the mental gymnastics” required to make your Christian faith “match up with reality.” We respond that Christianity never asks you to do any such thing. The Bible doesn’t promise to answer all of your questions. It doesn’t purport to “make sense” of everything for you (if you doubt this, go back and read the Book of Job). Its central purpose is to introduce you to the One who can resolve all these difficulties for you in His own way and in His own time. This will happen as you walk with Him by faith in the context of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Don’t make the mistake of confusing that relationship with the teachings of the church. We don’t say this to discount the importance of sound Bible doctrine. Far from it. Instead, we’re trying to emphasize the point that your love for God should be a living, breathing, dynamic thing. It’s not just a matter of dutiful adherence to a set of ideas. We can meet the Lord and experience the life-changing power of His grace in a single instant. But the story doesn’t end there. We’re going to spend eternity getting to know Him better and filling in the gaps in our piecemeal understanding of His character and the universe He has made. In the meantime, the important thing to bear in mind is that Jesus is the Lover of your soul. Why make your standing with Him dependent upon your ability to explain the unexplainable? Why run the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater?
This is what we believe the victims of earthquakes and other disasters need to know. We have no business telling them that their deceased friends and relatives “are burning in hell” (which is not for us to judge in any case). Instead, we should assure them that God loves them and has visited them in their suffering in the Person of the suffering Christ. They need to understand that the Creator of the world is for them and that He will stand beside them through thick and thin (Hebrews 13:5) if they will simply trust Him. We want you to know and understand the same thing.
If you’d like to discuss these thoughts at greater length with a member of our team, call our staff of pastoral counselors. They’d love to speak with you over the phone.
Resources
If a title is currently unavailable through Focus on the Family, we encourage you to use another retailer.
I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist
The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus
The Reason for God: Belief in and Age of Skepticism
Referrals
Articles
Becoming a Christian
