The Tilted Halo

EP 41: Growing Your Faith? Bring Your Doubts to the Light.

• Kathleen Panning

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Do doubts ever creep into your journey of faith? Don't worry, you're not alone. Join me as I bare my heart, describing my own battle with doubt in the midst of a health scare. In this episode we get vulnerable. I'm sharing my conversations with God that have been filled with questions and uncertainties to turn the tables on the stigma attached to doubts in faith. Far from being mere crises, doubts can be activators for spiritual growth and a deeper understanding of God. So, let's change the conversation. Here's an invitation to bring your doubts into the light, not as signs of weakness, but as instruments for growing in faith.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Tilded Halo. This is a new podcast and it's for anybody who's a woman in ministry. You might be a pastor like myself, a bishop, a priest, a rabbi, music minister, elder children's minister whatever your title is, you're absolutely in the right place, especially if you're someone who loves your ministry and you're doing it well and you're feeling pressure to sometimes be perfect and deep down inside you know you're not. And how in the world to deal with that? And, men, you're absolutely welcome here too, because this is about ministry and the same thing can happen to you. So you're all in the right place. Let's get started with the show.

Speaker 1:

When I was growing up, I remember hearing sermons from more than one pastor about doubt, and it was usually in the negative. To be very honest with you. There was came up any time, talked about doubting Thomas. Oh bad guy. He doubted that Jesus actually rose from the dead. You know he's got a lot of company even these days, but the whole idea was that doubt was a bad thing. We're not supposed to have any doubts, supposed to accept faith lock, stock and barrel and just keep going with it. I remember hearing a number of years ago that Mother Teresa, you know that wonderful, non-petite lady, powerhouse woman in Calcutta who spent her life dedicated to helping people with leprosy in India and she was given a Nobel Prize for that and she scraped by many times with what she had and yet always seemed to be able to have enough, but that she had doubts. And when I heard that I was like, oh wow, a woman like her, who has dedicated her life and service to God, who did everything seemed like based on faith and the power of faith, and that she had doubts. Hmm, what could that mean? Well, number one, it can mean that doubts are pretty normal, that doubts are not a bad thing, like I said when I grew up hearing the sermons about doubting Thomas and how bad it was that he was doubting. It was like doubts were agents of the devil in one, to put it bluntly, and that doubts were something we should push away and never admit to having any doubts and that, you know, doubts about anything, especially about faith, were no good. Anything about God. Don't doubt that, just believe, just believe. And that's what I believed and grew up with. And yet there was a time in my life where that became quite problematic, because I faced my own time of a great deal of uncertainty and a great deal of what's happening in my life and a great deal of time of questioning, questioning God, questioning my faith, questioning what I was feeling as a call to ministry.

Speaker 1:

I share this story in another medium. It's part of my book, in fact. It's that when I was starting my junior year in college had a routine physical, had one every year just before started. My junior year went off to school just like normal. School started, I think it was on a Wednesday, and I always talked to my parents on the weekend.

Speaker 1:

This was back in the good old days, long before modern technology, which means that in the dorm all women back in those days on each floor there was one telephone, just one. It was a pay phone in the middle of the hall, no phones in rooms and cell phones weren't even imagined yet. Anyway, that's where we went to make phone calls and if the phone rang, somebody who was passing by or lived in one of the rooms near the phone would answer the phone and then go grab whoever was requested on the phone. Well, it was Monday of that wasn't the first full week of school and somebody came knocking on my dormer and door and said I had a phone call I don't get phone calls in the middle of the week Couldn't imagine who in the world was calling me. And I picked up the phone and it was my mom.

Speaker 1:

But it was one of those situations where, from the word hello on and just how she said hello or it's mom, I knew something was wrong. I went through my brain that, okay, who died? It? Has dad been in an accident, because my dad traveled a lot for work. Something bad has happened. And I found out it wasn't somebody else, it was about me. See, when I had that routine physical, the doctors suggested I have a baseline chest x-ray. Okay, no problem, went off and did that, never thought of another thing of it.

Speaker 1:

Well, it come to find out that he had a reason for suggesting that and that something showed up on that chest x-ray and what showed up was that the right side of my heart was greatly enlarged and so my mom was calling to tell me that. And that led to a visit to a cardiologist and it led to a diagnosis that I had a hole in my heart where there wasn't supposed to be one, and that meant that, although it wasn't an emergency right at that time, if I did not have that corrected, I would have already lived half of my life or more. In other words, if I, chances of living to the age of 40 were very slim, and that really shook my world because I was feeling a call to ministry. And here I had this hole in my heart and it meant having open heart surgery. This was in a day and age where that was still very risky and I knew of only one person who had had any kind of heart surgery and he died and complications to that surgery. And this was somebody I knew personally not just knew of, but someone I knew personally and it was not an old man, and so it scared the daylight side of me thinking I have to have open heart surgery. They have to cut into my heart literally to fix that hole. There was no remote, robotic, microscopic surgery in those days either.

Speaker 1:

I got to wondering what was this feeling about being called into ministry? I might not live to do any of that. In fact, I was pretty convinced for several months that I wasn't going to live after the surgery and so I had all kinds of doubts and I had some extremely long conversations with God and I started writing some of them down into a journal. But even before I started writing them, there were long conversations I had with God. What's up, god? Why? All kinds of questions and, yes, in many ways doubts, and so I had to deal with my feelings about doubts as well as all of this. Can I still be a faithful person and ask these questions? Can I still be a faithful person and feel this way? Can I be a faithful person and even be angry with God? And I was angry with God at times. I was angry about the whole experience and I was scared More than anything else. I was scared.

Speaker 1:

Years later I obviously had the surgery and everything went fine, but years later, after becoming a pastor, I ran across a book by a fellow named Frederick Beekner B-U-E-C-H-N-E-R, I think is the correct spelling of his last name A Episcopalian priest and author, and he wrote a little book called Wishful Thinking a theological ABC, and in it he takes words and ideas that are often thrown around within faith communities and gives a new perspective on them, and one of them is the word doubt, and I don't have the full quote here with me, but there's one part of that quote that is very powerful for me and I want to share that with you as a maybe a different way of thinking about doubts. He says that, whether you have doubts or not, I mean, and basically that we all have them. And then he goes on to say and this is pretty near quote the doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving. I got the thinking about that. You know, doubt, the ants in the pants of faith, that's not the most delightful imagery, but you know, it keeps us from being sedentary, keeps us from just relying on the way we've always thought about things.

Speaker 1:

Doubts can be a way of asking questions and realizing that asking these questions of God it's okay. It's okay to do that, it's okay to have those doubts, because those doubts are the questions and the questions open us up to the possibility of seeing new answers, to seeing ourselves, to seeing other people, to seeing God in the world in a whole new way, expanding our faith. Yes, doubts could shrink our faith, but usually only if we see them as bad and judge the doubt and judge ourselves for doubting. Then we can shrink our faith that way, but doubts can keep our faith awake and moving, moving and thinking and expanding and deepening and enriching enriching us and our life and our faith and our work together. And as I think back on that experience, when I was doubting and asking all kinds of questions with God and having all kinds of long conversations and arguments even with God, it so deepened my faith Number one because I realized that's okay, it's okay to ask those questions, it's okay to not know, to have my halo tilted, it's okay to be questioning, questioning myself, questioning life, questioning even God. And what are you up to God? Why that question of why? Wanting an answer? Didn't always get answers to my questions, by the way, but the biggest answer came in knowing that I could ask and I could leave that why in God's hands to be able to hold that and to hold me in the midst of that, in the midst of the not knowing, not having all of the answers, in the midst of my doubts.

Speaker 1:

Sometimes, within what as a Christian I call the Old Testament and the New Testament, we get an image of God as a heavenly parent and those doubts and those questions and those agonizing times, kind of like if you've had the experience of being a child and curling up in loving parents' arms when something didn't go right in life and just knowing that warm embrace helps to make things better. That's what it's like when we bring our doubts into that relationship with God. That's what it's like to share those doubts, to ask those questions, to let thought be the answer in the pants of our faith, to keep us awake and moving, to keep our faith growing and becoming richer in many, many respects. So doubts, are they devilish? No, they can be very helpful. They can be a gift that even, in a sense, a gift that God gives us to grow. So remember, doubts are the ants in the pants of faith and I thank Frederick Beekner for those words.

Speaker 1:

Until next time, I am the Tilted Halo and this is the Tilted Halo. God's peace, god's blessings. Come back again for another show. You have been listening to Tilted Halo with me, kathleen Panning. What did you think about this episode? I'd really like to hear from you. Leave me some comments, be sure to like, subscribe and share this episode and catch another upcoming episode for more conversation on ministry life, mindset and a whole lot more. Go to wwwtiltedhalohelpcom, where I've got a resource guide and other resources waiting for you, and be sure to say hi to me, kathleen Panning, on LinkedIn. See you on the next episode.