Doubt

Sometimes I stress about.. what to post on my blog. I want something insightful, fun, interesting..etc. But.. I'm beginning to realize that this blog is more for me than it is for anyone else. It's a way for me to say what I think.. a creative outlet. Tonight I feel.. kind of like this monologue from the famous play and now movie Doubt by John Patrick Shanley.

What do you do when you're not sure? That's the topic of my sermon today.

Last year, when President Kennedy was assasinated, who among us did not experience the most profound disorientation. Despair?

Which way? What now?

What do I say to my kids? What do I tell myself? It was a time of people sitting together, bound together by a common feeling of hopelessness.

But think of that! You're BOND with your fellow being was your Despair.

It was a public experience. It was awful but we were in it together.

How much worse is it then for the lone man, the lone woman stricken by a private calamity?

No one knows I'm sick

No one knows I've lost my last real friend

No one knows I've done something wrong. Imagine the isolation. Now you see the world as through a window. On one side of the glass: happy untroubled people, and on the other side: you.

I want to tell you a story

A cargo ship sank one night. It caught fire and went down. And only this one sailor survived. He found a lifeboat, rigged a sail...and being of a nautical discipline...turned his eyes to the Heavens and read the stars. He set a course towards home and exhausted fell asleep. Clouds rolled in. And for the next twenty nights, he could no longer see the stars. He thought he was on course, but there was no way to be certain. And as the days rolled on, and the sailor wasted away, he began to have doubts. Had he set his course right? Was he still going on towards his home? Or was he horribly lost and doomed to a terrible death? No way to know. The message of the constellations - had he imagined it because of his desperate circumstance? Or had he seen truth once and now had to hold on to it without further reassurance?

There are those of you in church today who know exactly the crisis of faith I describe. And I want to say to you. Doubt can be a bond as powerful and sustaining as certainty. When you are lost. You are not alone.

We all have doubts in our lives. Something I have to remind myself of often is the saying:

"It'll all work out in the end, and if it doesn't work out, it's not the end"