Out of Sorts: Making Peace with an Evolving Faith

by Sarah Bessey

I’ve come to believe that there is always a bit of grief to the sorting out of a life, to making sense of the stories and the moments and intersections, in our ability to move forward with integrity. We figure out what we need to keep, what we need to throw away, and what we need to repurpose. Sometimes what looks like junk becomes precious because of the memories it holds. Other times, the memories are painful, and so we hold them to remind ourselves: never again. But as we make small piles of treasures and trash, we are sorting through a life and through our grief, making the way clear to move forward.

We have much to learn from the ordinary people, from people on the margins, from people who experience God and life so differently from ourselves.

If our theology doesn’t shift and change over our lifetimes, then I have to wonder if we’re paying attention. The Spirit is often breathing in the very changes or shifts that used to terrify us. Grace waits for us in the liminal space.

I think it’s a bit dishonest to use “Have faith like a child” as a way to shut a person down. Like, somehow, it means we’re not supposed to wonder, we’re just supposed to accept. Now that I have a house full of small humanity, I think I’m beginning to understand why Jesus would encourage us to have faith like a child. They don’t know. And so they ask. We don’t know. And so we ask. The asking isn’t wrong. The wondering isn’t wrong. The doubt isn’t wrong. It’s humbling to admit you don’t know; it takes guts to ask and wrestle. The childlike quality isn’t unthinking acquiescence: it’s curiosity.

Much of the Bible is the story of our fallible people seeking to understand and follow God.

I’m a mess and I’m beloved, both together, and this is not the end.

Anyone who gets to the end of their life with the exact same beliefs and opinions as they had at the beginning is doing it wrong.

Blessed are the wonderers with the courage to live into the questions.

I see the different kinds of Christians not as exclusively a lack of unity, but as affirmations of our diversity—the ways that God has reached us and spoken to us, the ways that God works with us and in us, with unique beauty. For the one who craves logic, there is a stream for you. For the one who craves liturgy and tradition, there is a stream for you.

I don’t blame God for much anymore. I see God as the rescue from the injustices, not the cause of them. I see God as the redeemer of the pain, not the origin of it. I see the promise of sovereignty not as hypercontrol over the minute and painful details of the world, but as a faithful promise that all things will be restored, all things will be redeemed, all things will be rescued.

Sometimes the most holy work we can do is listen to each other’s stories and take their suffering into our hearts, carrying each other’s burdens and wounds to Christ together, in faith and in lament, together.