Do I Still Believe It

She was asked a straightforward question in a kitchen at a party, by somebody who did not know her well and was only making conversation.

And she gave the answer. The full one. She has given it so many times that it comes out in paragraphs with the joins sanded smooth, and it is a good answer, and the man nodded and said that was interesting and went to get a drink.

And she stood there holding a glass and thought: I do not know if I think that.

Not I have changed my mind. Something stranger and colder than that. She could not locate, anywhere in herself, the difference between a thing she believed and a thing she had been saying for nineteen years.

She has defended it in three churches, at two conferences, and in one relationship that ended partly over it. She has read the good books on both sides. She has been, by any measure anybody uses, a serious person about it.

And in a kitchen, at a party, on an ordinary Saturday, she could not find the belief underneath the defense.

She has not told anybody. She would not know how to start the sentence.

If you have ever put your hand on a position you have held for years and felt around for what was underneath it, you know exactly what I mean.

What defending does to believing

Let me describe something carefully, and nothing in it is a verdict about your position, whatever it is. I do not know which one this is. It does not matter for what follows.

A belief and a defense are different organs and they can grow together until you cannot separate them by feel.

A belief is a thing you rest on. It carries weight when you are not thinking about it, which is the test of it, and most of the load it bears is invisible.

A defense is a structure you maintain in front of it. It is built out of arguments and anticipations and the four rebuttals you keep ready, and it is oriented outward, toward the room.

Here is the trouble. Maintaining the defense uses the same hours and the same attention that resting on the belief would use, and the defense is louder. So after nineteen years there is a great deal of structure and you cannot feel the ground.

Now read what Isaiah says strength actually is made of, because it is not what anybody would guess.

For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.Isaiah 30:15

Returning and rest. Quietness and confidence. Four words, and not one of them is a maneuver, and the context in Isaiah is a nation about to solve its problem by activity.

You are strong in a quietness rather than in a structure, and the strength was located there before you had a position to hold. That is not a rebuke of nineteen years. It is written in Isaiah 30:15, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

So the exhaustion is not doubt. You have ground under you that is not the position and was never the position, and it is holding you in that kitchen with the glass in your hand. The word settled that before you first opened your mouth about any of it, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

You are allowed to not know for a while

Here is what I want to hand you, and it is smaller and more useful than an answer.

You do not have to resolve this today. You do not have to announce anything, or write to anybody, or work out before Tuesday whether you still believe it. The pressure to know immediately is coming from the defense, which cannot tolerate an unoccupied position, and not from God, who has been perfectly comfortable with people not knowing things for long stretches.

Job did not know for thirty eight chapters.

And there is a real possibility worth naming, because it is the likeliest one: you may still believe it. You may find, when the structure has been quiet for a few months, that the ground is exactly where you left it and that you simply could not feel it through nineteen years of scaffolding.

Either way, the finding out requires quiet, and quiet is the one thing a maintained position never allows.

You have permission to be unsure out loud, and the permission is already given rather than something you earn by resolving it well. Isaiah 30 puts strength in quietness and confidence; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to stop talking about a thing long enough to find out whether it is there.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot stop defending is that somebody near you punishes you for wavering, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.