When I was a freshman in college, I experienced a crisis of faith. I was attending Huntington College — it hadn’t yet reached the status of University — and I walked into one of my professor’s offices during office hours, plopped down on a chair, and boldly stated: “I am here, because I have a lot of doubts.”
The professor replied, “Doubts? About what? About yourself? About this College? About the weather, or about God?”
I said, “About God. I never doubt myself. I don’t know if I believe in God anymore.”
Oddly, he smiled, sat back in his chair, and said, “Good. This is the good part. Doubt has its benefits. It helps you to really examine what you really believe, and I promise you, you will emerge from this experience with much stronger beliefs.”
Doubt is a feeling of uncertainty or lack of conviction. It also implies that we are wavering between two views, and it leaves us lacking confidence. In the Bible, James describes what it’s like to feel doubts this way:
“A doubtful mind will be as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.” James I:6
We humans have a natural inclination to seek certainty and control over our lives. Doubt challenges this desire for certainty and introduces a sense of ambiguity and unpredictability. When we are faced with doubt, we experience discomfort and anxiety due to our inability to confidently predict or control outcomes or to guarantee that we will perform well.
Doubt can create psychological discomfort that arises when we hold conflicting beliefs, ideas, or perceptions. And when everything we have believed is challenged, we feel unstable, and confused.
Doubt is also associated with our fear of making incorrect decisions or choices, because we like to avoid errors and we usually strive for accuracy. Doubt can make us feel vulnerable in our relationships.
The bottom line is that when doubt arises, the core aspects of our self are threatened. When we doubt ourselves, we lose some of our self-esteem. We can also be filled with negative thoughts and criticism, especially following major mistakes or missteps. So I have to say — I don’t know HOW that professor told me doubting was the good part……
One of the newer phrases to trend in recent years is imposter syndrome — which is a psychological state in which people express self-doubt on their accomplishments and skills, despite factual evidence or other people indicating otherwise. It is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. Imposter syndrome can occur in all careers, and even in our relationships. Even celebrities will often admit that they have imposter syndrome.
Another phrase that often crops up in scholarly writing about doubt is the phrase Cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance very simply is the discomfort we feel when our behavior doesn’t align with our beliefs, or when we hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time.
Sounds weird, right? But it happens. For example, we know that smoking or drinking too much is harmful to our health, but we do it anyway. We want to build up our savings, but we spend our extra money as soon as we get it. We have a long to-do list, but we spend the day watching our favorite tv shows instead. When we behave in a way that does not fit our belief system, we might feel shame, or regret. We might lose confidence or faith in ourselves.
Our brains don’t like cognitive dissonance. Our brains prefer binary beliefs. We are either republican or democrat, religious or secular, hero or villain. But what happens when we want to stand between those two polar opposites? That’s called living in the gray, instead of embracing the black and white. I believe, and perhaps you’ll join me, that politics and religion give us the most difficulty with black and white thinking.
For me, the perfect example of world-wide cognitive dissonance is the Covid 19 pandemic. Stopping absolutely everything for absolutely every single person in the entire world, challenged everything we had believed about life. About freedom to come and go as we pleased. Freedom of expression, proximity to our friends and family members. The global pandemic was the biggest anxiety-producing event of our lifetimes. And as a result, we are still — 4 years later — filled with mistrust, with a lack of confidence in so many things — with low self-esteem and with a great amount of doubt.
So how do we get rid of our imposter syndrome? Our self-doubt? Our doubts which crop us because we believe two conflicting ideas?
I think we all need to realize that our lives are filled with ambiguity — which is defined as “something that does not have a single, clear meaning.”
During the pandemic we all took a master class on living with ambiguity — whether we wanted to, or not. And ambiguity has remained with us in full force. I think our ticket to handling doubt is to learn to live with ambiguity. To learn to sit in the gray. And to learn a new word: BLURSED.
BLURSED is a combination of blessed and cursed. Things that bring joy and comfort, but also bother, confuse or threaten us. That is our life now. Here are some lessons we have learned about living with ambiguity, and understanding this BLURSED life we have:
Don’t plan too far ahead; stay in the moment.
Celebrate the positive things in life — large or small. Acknowledge what is good and beautiful, notice small moments, take pictures. Pay attention to the beauty of our world.
Take care of yourself. I say this all the time — and sometimes I even do it. Get sleep, eat healthy, and smile and laugh.
Be kind to others. Small kindnesses help all of us with doubt. I believe that kindness erases some of the doubt.
Have any of your heard of Doubting Thomas — a character in the Bible?
After the Easter morning experience, when Jesus met with the disciples, he showed them the marks of his crucifixion. All of the disciples were filled with joy to see Jesus again. Jesus blessed them and left. Well, it just so happened that one of the disciples, Thomas, was not present to see Jesus. So, when the others told Thomas that they had seen Jesus, Thomas said, “I’ll never believe it without putting my finger in the nail marks and my hand into the spear wound. I don’t believe he is back.”
A few days later, Jesus was with the disciples again, and he said specifically to Thomas, “Take your finger and examine my hands. Put your hand into my side. Don’t give in to your doubts any longer. Just believe.” Thomas did so, and then he said to Jesus. “I believe.”
More often than we want to admit, we are like Doubting Thomas. We have to see it with our own eyes in order to believe it. And there is the rub. Many of the things we must believe in our lifetime are not tangible. We can’t touch love or freedom. We can’t see our own progress. We have to believe with faith. Perhaps my professor at Huntington College knew what he was talking about. Perhaps as we examine our doubts, we do actually discover what it is that we believe. So let’s go be kind and live our blursed ambiguous lives. Maybe then we can move beyond the shadow of doubt. Amen.
William Shakespeare wrote: “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.” — Shakespeare
In other words, our doubts get in the way of our efforts to do good. We just stop trying. May we all persevere in our efforts to accept the ambiguity of this blursed life that we have been given.
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