Doubt All You Want
If you’re tired of trying to overcome doubt, try befriending it.
For most of my life, I believed that having doubts was a sign of weakness. I thought that I always had to be absolutely certain and unshakeable in my beliefs. If at any time I wasn’t, I was being wishy-washy and at a bad place.
This belief stems from my religious upbringing. I grew up in a Christian household, and my family attended a small Presbyterian church for most of my childhood and adolescence. For as long as I can remember, I attended Sunday school programs where we learned about extraordinary events like a man sending terrible plagues to Egypt, a shepherd boy killing a giant with just a sling and a stone, and people getting raised from the dead.
With each story, we were told to believe that all these events are historical truths, and if we had any shred of doubt, it was because we lacked faith.
As a child, I genuinely believed that all these events occurred because I had the imagination of a child, and I trusted the adults who were teaching me these stories.
When I now look back, I can’t help but laugh at these adults who told me that I had to believe in their Sunday school stories without a shadow of a doubt. Examples of what I was expected to believe include the following:
