Unknowing

Quick - tell me something that you believed as a kid and later, found out to be not exactly the truth. My guess is that if you're like the rest of us, something came to mind pretty quickly, and you even chuckled a bit while you thought of it. You were so young, so innocent, so naive. It's...cute. 

The truth is, there was a time in your life when you didn't know something, so you created a story to make sense of it, and that's what you believed. 

In fact, this is true almost all the time in your life. There are things that you don't know that you make up stories about so that they seem to make sense to you. And not just you, but everyone does this. And then, we share those stories with one another and sometimes, they make so much sense that we just adopt them, too. Because hey, we don't know. 

In fact, everything that you know right now is something that once upon a time, you didn't know. 

Think about that for a second. Every single thing that you know right now is something that you didn't always know (even the things about which you talk with the certainty of a 4-year-old and declare, "I just always knew that"). We are, at our core, a learning and growing people. 

So why do we think that our faith is any different?

That's what we're really talking about here. We're talking about the things about God that we think we know, then we discover that it's just been a story we've told ourselves (or someone has told us) because we did not, in fact, know it after all. We're talking about discovering greater truths as we grow and experience more things and have increasing interactions with God and with the world around us, even with ourselves. 

And we want to label this "doubt"? Or "deconstruction"? 

What if it's just growth?

This is one of the troubles with the world that we live in. We feel like we have to label everything, to name it, to pathologize it. Everything's got its place in our psyche, everything has its roots in our insecurities, everything is something, and even when it's normal, we can't just let it be normal. We have to name it, to label it, to give it its own space and make it into a thing. 

So we never just learn any more. We never just grow. We never just encounter new information and work to adopt it into our greater understanding. Instead, we "doubt" and we "deconstruct." But what if we're not? 

How would it change your faith - your relationship with God - if you were allowed to just explore it, without labels? If you were allowed to be curious and to encounter new information and to receive new data? If you were allowed to just grow in it, without it being a thing?