Doubts

I have always been an efficient study-er. If a question or detail is not essential to understanding the main concept of something, I didn’t see the point of following the rabbit trail. I like to move through content quickly and efficiently, organizing it in such a way that is understandable and useful. Last year, I decided to read the Bible in a year and I absolutely loved it! I was able to quickly and efficiently consume the Bible in its entirety and I learned so much in that process. This year, then, I decided to slow down and focus on meditating and memorizing God’s Word. I decided to start in Romans, while also reading a chapter of Proverbs every day for a year, such that by the end of 2022 I’ll have read Proverbs 12 times. In that, my prayer has been that God will increase my knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. After only a week, my world has been rocked, and not in the way I expected.

As I have read Romans, I have come up with more questions, doubts, and fears than I ever have before when reading the Bible. I am reading about God’s sovereignty, His wrath towards unrighteousness, and how only some receive His mercy. These are all concepts I’m quite familiar with, but I don’t know if I have ever spent an extended time processing, reading and rereading it straight from the Bible. I have never given such room for my own curiosity to grow, and now I feel like it has blossomed into doubts and fears and questions that I’m not sure I want the answer to.

I ended my time in the Word yesterday full of anxiety and anger. This was not how this year was supposed to start off! I’m supposed to go overseas in 4 days, and yet here I am, wrestling with God’s sovereignty and man’s free will, and to be completely honest, it doesn’t seem very fair to me. As I prepare to leave the country, I know I’m going to have to cling to God in the newness of it all, but how do you cling to someone who feels very distant and honestly a little scary right now? I realized that I have been trying to stuff God into my carry-on suitcase so that I can safely and conveniently take Him with me overseas. But the problem is, He isn’t fitting into my suitcase, and I don’t think He’s going to fit in the airplane either. I want to have God mastered before I head overseas and experience a million new things, but time is running out. Am I really expected to have a handle on this by the time I leave?

What I am learning is that God is not a travel-size God. He is not a God of my convenience. In fact, He is a lot bigger than I ever realized or expected and I feel tiny in comparison. Who am I to think that I could master His character at the age of 21? While this may feel like a super inconvenient time to be flooded with questions about who God is, I trust that He is intentional in the timing of this all. I am comforted by Isaiah 55:8-9, which says, “‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways, my ways,’ declares the Lord. ‘For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.’”

As I put my thoughts on paper, and very honestly poured out my questions, doubts, and fears to the Lord this morning, the Holy Spirit brought to mind a phrase that I have become quite familiar with in the past few days reading Proverbs: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Here I am, having been praying for the past 9 days of 2022 that the Lord would give me wisdom and understanding and instead, He is giving me fear, doubt, and questions—which feels like the opposite of understanding. Through this though, the Holy Spirit is showing me that if I am seeking wisdom, I must first have a proper understanding of how big God is and how small I really am. Wisdom is less about having God "figured out" and more about learning to properly fear Him.