Guest Post - A Doubter Of All Things

This week’s guest entry comes from my friend Bob Gregory. Bob and I met at the Wild Goose Festival a few years back and he’s been a guest on the podcast too. Go visit him on Facebook and show him some love!

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“Prove it.” “Where did you here that?” “Interesting, but what about ______?” “That doesn’t make any sense because _______.”

To the dismay of my wife and sometimes my parents and friends, these are the words that I live by now. I call myself a critic, a skeptic, a doubter of all things, but mainly towards the spiritual - the things that can’t be proven. 

I wasn’t always like this. I grew up with the words “his ways are not our ways, his thoughts are not our thoughts” and “the lord works in mysterious ways”, “he has a plan” constantly scrolling through my head.

In church I can’t remember how many times i heard the phrase “faith like a child” … learning that what the faith of a child really meant was blind obedience, blind trust.  If I didn’t understand it, it was fine! God knew! God made the sky the way it is, the stars the way they were ... sicknesses ... death. .. I didn’t understand it but it was ok, because someone did. I was just supposed to trust ... right?

Have you ever known a child? Met a child? The faith of a child is not blind trust. It’s rampant and unapologetic learning, questioning. “Why?” “But mommy how?” “but daddy who?” “But why did they do that?” “But why is it that shape?” It’s relentless. It’s annoying. It’s beautiful. The mind of a child is always searching for answers. The last thing they wanna hear is “because I said so”. As we grow those around us that like their certainty begin to tell us not to ask those questions, and “because I said so” quickly turns into “because God” … trying to end the curiosity and the hard conversations. 

Curiosity is everything. In my 20s somehow I let an idea into my head that changed everything …

“What if God wasn’t as afraid of my questions as people were. What if God was bigger that I’d been told ... than I’d imagined.”

That paradigm shift instantly opened me up to what I had always been, as curious as a child. What is God? Is God what I’ve been taught? What parts of what I was taught are true? Which parts are wrong? Is there even a God? What about all the other religions? Do their gods exist? Heaven? Hell? The Bible? What does history and science have to say?

And more importantly I wasn’t afraid to ask them.

So where did the questions lead me? To freedom. The freedom of not knowing but always asking. Religion, politics, morals … nothing is off limits.

We are where we are because someone questioned the one that came before them. 

Be like a child. Be curious. Be brave.