Searching for Enough: The High-Wire Walk Between Doubt and Faith

by Tyler Staton

The bravest person in any church on any Sunday is the person honestly trying to figure out if Jesus is worth real consideration, because if he is, it will probably mean questioning the foundation their entire life is built on. It means the conclusions that have always made them feel safe aren’t safe anymore. The bravest person in the rows of flimsy, white Ikea chairs set out in the old Jewish synagogue we rent to hold church in each Sunday is the undecided person who is honest enough to ask the questions that matter.

We are changed by encounter—the overlap of objective and subjective information. Information I’ve found easy to overlook plenty of times before is now colliding with my personal story at just the right moment in just the right way. That’s what changes us.

“I hope you’ll hear what I’m about to tell you. I hope you’ll hear it all the way down to your toes. When you’re waiting, you’re not doing nothing. You’re doing the most important something there is. You’re allowing your soul to grow up. If you can’t be still and wait, you can’t become what God created you to be.”3

God reveals himself in the collision point of stories. He finds us trapped between two unsatisfying stories, getting through days by changing the subject, learning to cover ourselves with fig leaves one disappointment at a time, and says, “Here’s a way to live again.”

Resurrection is about terminal problems.

Death is the great scale that weighs out the worth of everything we are and everything we do. And death is a terminal problem.

There are two kinds of problems that are universal to every human being: The terminal problem: nothing lasts past the death awaiting us. The internal problem: we all live with struggles that we try to numb or hide.

Everyone deals with the terminal and internal problems, and the solution for every other belief system is a philosophy—an enlightened state to transcend human problems. Jesus stands out because he didn’t teach a solution; he became a solution. The word for that is resurrection.

Resurrection is an invitation to a finished work on our behalf, but it’s also a unique, participatory role in ongoing redemption. An invitation to breathe in the very life of God, to begin living a redeemed life right here and now, and to join in filling the earth with that very life until it covers every square inch.

Real spirituality begins, though, when a person stops theorizing about God and begins actually attempting to know God. That’s how it’s always worked. Theory is safe and predictable because you get to remain in control. Theory happens on your terms. Relationship, on the other hand, is anything but safe and predictable. Relationship is to surrender control, to be open to disappointment again, but maybe, just maybe, on the other side of an attempt to actually know God, you’ll find life.