Thought for the Week - 8.5.25

It’s the main festival of the Christian year, a lunar festival, so its date changes each year. 

It’s a festival of joy born in fear of the unknown, the unexpected, and if you’re not sure about religion, it can help to know that doubt plays a part. 

For believers, this can be a comfort. Our faith is about the impossible becoming real, grief turning to happiness, God-with-us, Immanuel, walking beside us in our suffering and bringing wholeness, goodness, out of it.

Sometimes, we feel we’re in the tomb, without hope, and it takes faith in a God, who is beyond the boundaries of life, beyond reality as we know it, who chose to enter into human history, lived alongside us, died painfully at the hands of human beings – and then returned to bring us new life. 

However strongly Christians may believe this, it is impossible to have faith without ever having doubts, about whether God exists, or cares, or remembers, or whether a good man tortured to death long ago, as so many have suffered in our own day, has any special meaning for us, let alone that God lives, journeys with us, and that each of us was ’curiously and wonderfully made’ of out love to take a unique role in the life of the world, and then in eternity.

We can’t manufacture belief, and trying to may make non-believers walk away angry or bewildered. Anyone can honestly seek belief, through thinking and reading; and in why our treatment of others matters. 

If we believe yet doubt, rather than trying to hide our thoughts from God we can say in Scripture’s words, ‘I believe, help my unbelief’, or find, like Thomas at the first Easter, that the proof is both in and far beyond the touchable, beyond experience, as we meet the mystery of eternal love.