How do you get from not believing to REALLY believing??

[scotchick]

I've struggled for about 20 years with this. Gone through many phases, some of them lasting years, of going to church. BUT, I just can't get past the above.

Seriously, how do you guys do it? How do you reconcile all the discrepancies, eg size of our universe (why did God just create us, here?), dinosaurs etc.

I really wish I could believe totally, but am thinking it will never happen for me. Can hardly believe, given my past, that I don't take my kids to sunday school.

Any words of wisdom would really help.

Anyone?

Ah well, just thought I'd ask.

are you saying that you are a regular church goer but not a believer? I can't quite tell from your post.
One of the most significant sentences in the sunday service , for me, is "Great is the mystery of Faith". There is and must be an element of mystery about believing , simply because spiritual and religious feelings cannot be seen. They cannot be 'proven' in a scientific or 'logical' way, but so what?
Yes there are discrepancies in life, both on a tiny scale and also a huge scale: some people perform wonderful, selfless acts for humanity, others kill and destroy for pleasure. Why? because they can and God allowed us free will and complete independence in that way.

I believe that discrepancies are part of life in the same way that I love the bones of my eldest dd but sometimes feel as if I could strangle her and that she is infuriating! there is nothing wrong with discrepancies! we don't really control life, after all.

HTH

Why do you feel the need to believe?
If you don't believe why try?
We are our own Gods

Can't help, really, but this is my experience. Quite a lot of churchgoing as a child, went to secular secondary school with very active and evangelical Christian Union which I joined early on. From that time until I was about 21 there were two places in my head - either I was going to be a total Christian, i.e. a missionary like Gladys Aylward or a nun or just anyone that truly devotes their life to religion, or nothing. I spent a lot of time trying to be the former and deeply uncomfortable about it too, although I would say that it was not the fault of most of the Christians I met. Then I had a crisis just before graduating and didn't go to church again for years.

Then I met dh and spent 18 months doing a course at a synagogue. (A whole other story). What this, combined with reading everything Karen Armstrong has written, did for me was liberate me from the 'either/or' thing - that if I couldn't believe the whole of the Nicene Creed, or couldn't bring myself to tell anybody that Jesus had died for them, that I couldn't have any religion at all. Here was a whole religion (Judaism) that did not have to state that they believed Jesus rose from the dead, and yet they were great people and in many cases very religious. So I'm now back at church and enjoying it, and may even end up much more of a believer than I would ever have believed ten years ago. But for now, it's simple; I believe that prayer, above all, benefits me and helps me love other people more effectively and to be a better person; and that going to church helps me to pray. Beyond that, it's all questions, and for now that's OK.

very good post acnebride - the whole ' either/or' thing puts a lot of people off I think - for a lot of us there are and always will be questions.

yes but donnie, the questions overwhelm me and prevent me from having any faith.

Albatros, I don't know why I feel I need to believe. I haven't been to church for about 3 years, I was a regular attender til something happened in my life which I would have expected my church to support me in - being my 'family' and all. Well, they didn't and I lost faith in them - I know, Christians are people and make mistakes but I've only really NEEDED the church to help me once and they didn't.

Anyway, that's not why Iost my faith, that was happening anyway.

I just could never say outright that I don't believe in God, I feel like I do most of the time, and then when I sit down and really think about it it seems utterly ridiculous.

Also, false humility and sanctimoniousness in many Christians I met has really put me off.

Hiya,
I'm a Christian and have been since I was 13. These thoughts might sound sanctimonious - sorry if they do, I certainly don't mean to be - all that I know of christianity has mainly come through sheer holding on when times have been really tough and yes I've been badly let down by church / other christians. It took me a long time to recover and start to trust those same christians with my deepest struggles and true self again.

Anyway, FWIW, my thoughts are - faith is not something people just have - so often I've heard people say "Oh, I envy your faith" but the thing is faith is a gift from God and not inherently part of who we are (or are not, IYSWIM!). I believe that if we ask God for faith and ask it genuinely, He will be thrilled to give it to us. It comes in an infinite variety of ways and over the years I've heard so many completely different stories of how people came to believe but the one defining factor is the real assurance that God has truly come and made his presense known in that person's life. Quite often it's a very long process which is almost imperceptible at the time but as you look back you can see how God was arranging the circumstances of your life, allowing you to meet people who would say important things to you, and sometimes touching your spirit (that might sound a bit airy-fairy but if you've experienced it you know it's real) in gentle but powerful ways.

Also - one of my fave prayers is by St THeresa and it starts "Christ has nobody now on earth but yours, no hands, no feet but yours" and the point is that most of the time God seems to choose to speak through other people rather than a thunderclap from heaven (although I've heard those stories as well and had a few in my own life). I've puzzled over why He does this and the one of the things I've thought is that he so wants us to be in meaningful and satisfying relationships with each other rather than isolated spiritual thrill-seekers (no man is an island and all that). So that's why, however inadequate your local experience of christians is, it's so life-giving to find christian friends who you can talk deeply with and share your concerns and heartbreaks with.

Don't want to bombard you with the Bible but Jesus said "Where two or three are gathered in my name I am there in the midst of them" That doesn't necessarily need to mean "church" in the traditional sense, it could be hooking up with a christian friend. On MN there are some fab christians who are totally honest about the highs, lows and in betweens of being a christian.
THe christian prayer thread would be one place to start if you want to ask others to pray that God would give you the gift of faith.

Another thing - "faith comes from hearing the word of God". The number of times God has spoken intimately to me through the Bible and answered exactly the prayer that is pressing on me by showing me what life looks like from the perspective of eternity. If you find traditional Bibles a bit off-putting there's a very modern translation which is still true to the original sense, called "The Message". You can get it on Amazon.

THe last thing - yes there are discrepancies (or mysteries if you prefer) and over time I've gone from being worried about them and feeling that to "believe" I have to have well-researched answes, to rather liking them. Whether dinosaurs existed or if there's life on other planets are the stuff of good pub chats with friends, not make-or-break-faith big issues. I guess (this might madden you) that as I've experienced more and more of God's presence in my life I've amassed a heap of personal evidence that God exists, that these questions can't even begin to compete with. That's not to say that I don't bother thinking about these things, it's just that I've come to accept that the universe is bigger than my brain and there are some things which are simply beyond me. I'm certainly not thick or thoughtless and I do love using my brain to seek out the best answers to difficult questions about faith, God etc (I love being challenged as to why I believe!) but I know that my answers are only partial and open-ended.

Sorry to ramble - HTH anyway, or sparks off some thoughts in you. CAT me if you want to talk about it any more. I don't mind at all if you disagree with every word I've said and I won't be offended by anything!
God bless

I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to give such a detailed reply. I do appreciate that.

I do have a number of Christian friends - some from church when I was a teenager (very keen then). I've kind of given up talking to them about it and haven't for years. We used to have big discussions which usually ended up with all of us with head in hands wondering what we believe. The thing is they still do and I don't. Well, not that I don't but I can't bring my self to commit as I don't believe 'enough'.

I'm a really questioning person anyway and am always fascinated by the world and everything in it. But the questions I have re God are so massive that I can't get around them. I think it must be so good to be like you (and my friends) and think - 'why does pluto exist? I don't know but it doesn't matter'. To me it does matter, and it's such an issue that it has made me totally doubt my faith (not just about pluto obviously, dinosaurs, evolution, other solar systems etc).

People reading this are probably thinking why bother? I had a conversation when I was about 19 with a friend and she said, either commit, or forget the whole thing. I can't do either.

On a day to day basis, it's not such a big deal, but it's always there in the back of my mind.

Sigh!

Is it not there at the back of your mind just because that's the way you were brought up, "programmed" to think that there is a god and that you have to choose not to believe. As though you are "rejecting" the idea? I was brought up RC and had a lot of trouble coming to terms with not believing. Only relatively recently have I felt able to think that there is no god so I can't be rejecting anything, nothing there. Don't even like referring to myself as an atheist as dislike/resent the theist bit. No god in the first place so seems crazy to define myself by a lack of it. I do think the programming from birth that there is a god is very powerful and very difficult to shake off.

Hi again,
It's a toughie, isn't it? But think of your day - you get up in the morning (presumably!) and you get out of bed - you trust in the law of gravity. You switch the kettle on - you trust that electricity exists (even tho you can't see it, prob. don't understand how it works but fully understand it could kill you if used wrongly), you've got a bit of a headache so you take some paracetomol, you trust in the pharmaceutical company which you have never visited, that this little pill, formulated and packed by people you'll never meet, which could actually be anything for all you know, will help and not harm you...and so it goes on. The point is that in order to get through life without going insane we have to have faith in all sorts of people, institutions and things, most of which are way beyond the average person's brain capacity. Babies are born trusting in their mothers and it is that trust which ensures the baby's physical survival (which is why it's so awful when parents break that trust).

I'm a very questioning person too and I reject any forms of Christianity I see as false. I wonder tho - would it actually make any difference to belief in God if we do discover life on Mars? I'm sure it wouldn't to me. It'd be cool! And do you ask quesions like that one on the TV ad, "What are daddy-long-legses for?" (great question, eh?) Was your church background very fundamentalist, the world is 6000 yrs old type of theology? because if it were I can quite see why you don't agree with that. (I don't).

When I first became a Christian I went to a very charismatic, fundamentalist type of church and ended up leaving because there was so much I disagreed with and found cracks in theologically (apologies to any charismatics - I know you're not all like that!!) But the thing was that by that point I had experienced so much of God's love and transforming power in my life that I couldn't deny that there in all the confusion and downright rubbish was something powerfully real. So off I went to the jolly old CofE where it's fine to question, debate and disagree to your heart's content and still be one big happy family.

I know it's a cliche but there's that saying that we have a God-shaped hole in our hearts and I do believe that only He can fill it. Maybe you need to think about - is that thing at the back of your mind a mental cerebral problem-solving itch, or is it more emotional / spiritual? or both? What is it you're really looking for?

scotchick, I kind of know where you are coming from. I find the books by Marcus Borg and (whisper it) John Spong very helpful in moving from 'supernatural' Christianity to something more...I don't know, fact-based? I've never lost my belief in my heart but in the recent past have found it hard to belive with my head. I've read so much theology that my faith has become a bit dry - I now know where my head is but am needing to rekindle it in my heart, IYSWIM. It's even becoming that although I don't believe in the Creed as fact, I believe in its spirit (well, some of it!) Don't know if any of that makes sense? I think churches put people off with their creeds and dogma.

Hi scotchick
I'v ebeen thinking and praying about how to answer you, because this was a big question for me when I finally got serious about my faith.

There is a story about Jesus, in Mark ch 9, where a man brings his sick son to Jesus. You should go and read it, if youhave a bible there. Basically, Jesus tells the man that everything is possible for him who beleives. The father replies 'I do beleive, help me overcome my unbeleif!'
I do beleive that if you are sincere you can say the same to God. It seems to me that you really, truly want this beleif but are doggged by so many questions that you dont know where to start. I would suggest to you that the start is with Christ, that you need to talk to Him and tell Him how you are feeling about this. I am being perfectly serious here - if you want God to reveal Himself to you, then ask him!

I always come back to a saying of St Augustine, from about 200 AD "Thou hast nade us foir thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in thee, oh Lord". And I looked this up in my bible today cos I wasnt sure of the source and discovered it is a little handwritten note that I havent credited "some things are better understood by believing that believed by understanding:

Where are you in scotland, as a total aside. There seem to be a lot of scottish MN ladies there days. I'm in Glasgow. If you are local to me I'd love to meet up to chat about all of this, and more. In the meantime, I will be praying for you!

And can I suggest NT Wright's book ' The Challenge of Jesus" ?
Marvellous!

And texasrose = apology accepted - I am a bit of a charismatic but also a passionate believer in the needs of the poor and very into liberation theology - I make my evangelical pastor cringe but still I am accepted, because I know Jesus ....

Hi Harrissey,
Don't want to hijack this thread on a complete tangent but let me just say that there is so much in the charismatic churches thast I so admire and aspire to and which has had a fantastic impact on oter denominations too. I'd say that I am charismatic myself in that I believe in the gifts of the Holy Spirit and have experienced many of them in my own life. The thing I'd say is that I get wound up with churches which practise and preach stuff that is not biblical - and in all honesty there are churches like that in every denomination. (It's just that in my case I've seen some dodgy aspects of charismatic churches.) So be charismatic and be proud!
Everyone else - sorry to go off on one. Don't want to distract from the main point!

I think pigeonholes get in the way. I have had charismatic experiences, in some ways my faith is very Catholic and I am also a radical in other ways. I just describe myself as Christian because I know the next part of my journey could get me somewhere totally different.

Yes I sgreee totally.
I go to baptist church but have been in a an anglican setting for 10 years. I am charismatc bu talso very radical ( I love liberation theology) ther are so many aspects oof theology that dont fit!

And once people start to think of themselves as belonging to a particular tribe, it becomes divisive. I used to be on the Deanery Synod and I never voted in the elections for the GS because it was just like party politics - mostly divided along evangelical/liberal lines. There can be such a 'them and us' attitude to anyone whose faith has a different way of expression.

hi, im pretty new to the group but was just skipping through discussions and i find what texasrose is writing to be totally helpful to me. if you ever want to share storys and maybe restore my faith? give me an email at: [email protected]
thanks