“Doubt: A Path to Faith” Ep#30

Doubt isn’t a lack of faith; it’s the machete you carry into the jungle of your own soul. In this episode of Spiritual Hot Sauce, Chris Jones explores why spiritual growth requires leaving the comfort of secondhand stories about God and venturing into your own uncertain, messy, and deeply personal encounter with the Divine. Using his bull elephant metaphor, Chris challenges listeners to stop settling for one-size-fits-all religion and instead embrace adversity, inner struggle, and real-life risk as the very path to discovering how you most need to see God—for yourself.

This episode of “Spiritual Hot Sauce” by Chris Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  

Transcript

Chris Jones 0:00

Doubt. Most of us grew up believing that doubt in religion is a problem, and it was something that needed to be dealt with. People would gather around and try to offer advice and insight to help you back to a place of belief. And sometimes it was even seen as a sin, that we just needed to embrace what we were taught. Is it possible that doubt isn't a problem or a sin, but a tool, a necessary tool to help you navigate your faith and find your truth? Welcome. I'm Chris Jones. And this is Spiritual Hot Sauce. Are we getting it right? The big question for me is, am I getting it right? I spend a lot of time in front of the mirror challenging myself, doubting myself, doubting, am I gravitating to the easy road and the easy path rather than where I should be? I think the reality is you find your truth in the struggle. It's not easy. It wasn't meant to be easy. You know, recently I had John Williamson on the show, and he brought up a good point that we all start on square one. And I think we all do start on square one. And the idea is to move along and progress and grow. And when we had that discussion, I brought up the metaphor of the bow elephant that I use often. Now, if you've never heard me use this metaphor or you need a refresher, let me just give a brief recap. The bull elephant represents a true firsthand personal encounter with the divine. The jungle is what stands between you and the experience of the bull elephant. Everyone's jungle is different, but it does represent adversity that happens internally and externally, things we have to overcome. The community represents organized religion, where we often trade personal journey for the comfort of community. Now, my conversation with John, I had said that you can be together in community and talk about the bow elephant that's out in the jungle. You can sing praises to the bow elephant, you can teach each other about the bow elephant, you can even have someone there that's had experiences with a bow elephant and tell you what you need to do and to make the bow elephant happy and how it should work. But until you leave the community and go through the process and the journey in the jungle of finding the bow elephant and having that experience, until then, you've just been in community. You've never had the real experience. But it's in navigating the jungle is the adversity. That's where you are grown. That's where you're made stronger. And it is a process. It's not an event. You don't just walk out and go look at the bow elephant. But the tool that I said that you take with you to like a machete to navigate through the jungle is doubt. Doubt should be one of your primary tools. I mean, without doubt, you have no true way to navigate the jungle. You'll just be roaming around. I mean, and don't get me wrong, the journey is most of this process to get to your experience of realization. But you'll never get to that realization unless you use doubt. So doubt isn't unbelief, it's a tool. Two different things. We all want the new thing. We all want to feel the growth. We all want something better. But here's the problem: nobody wants to leave their comfortable chair. We don't want to get up and go find it. We want that experience to come to us. Nobody wants change because change is scary. Change is terrifying because we don't know what's on the other side. We want absolutes. We want to live in a place that doesn't have the unknown. We want safe unknown. We want new, but we want it brought to us where we are. I think that's why we love movies and video games because it allows us to sit in our chair and experience an adventure that doesn't require risk from us. It allows us to experience it without experiencing it. It's hearing the story of the bull elephant in a grandiose way. In some ways, I think that's why we are so comfortable with taking the tool of doubt and placing it on the altar of the church. And then sitting in our chair of certainty while somebody tells us about their adventure with the bull elephant or tells us a story of someone else's adventure with the bull elephant. There's no risk in this. It gives us the sense of adventure without the adventure. It gives us the sense of the seeking without truly seeking. See, in that situation, change isn't required. And that's what we fear is change. Change is uncomfortable. Change is even painful, even if it's for the better. And I think that's why we're so comfortable with trading our adventure of the journey for the story about the journey, because change isn't required, and our comfort is intact. That's why we need to embrace the uncertainty of change. Why is this so important? Well, think about it like this. When you go to church, well, I mean, even if you go to temple or mosque or a synagogue, wherever you go, but when you go in this gathering, we're always present a God in a one size fits all. In other words, it's about us assimilating ourselves to that God. And I'm not saying there isn't some assimilating yourself to God. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is a one size fits all God, a one-dimensional God, isn't realistic. That if you think about the disciples and Jesus, what was their relationship with him? Was it the same? No, it wasn't. Peter had a different relationship with Jesus than John the beloved did. If you asked John the beloved, what was your relationship like with Jesus? He would tell you Jesus was very loving, very nurturing, very calming, very peaceful. He calmed his anxiety, he calmed his worries, and he brought him this beautiful place of rest in uncertainty. But if you ask Peter, what's your relationship like with Jesus? Peter would tell you, mine's nothing like John's relationship. Jesus challenges me, he pushes me. At times it even seems like he forces me into a little bit of that anxiety and that uncertainty to experience it. So why is their relationship so different? Well, because each of them needed to experience Jesus in that way. Because it wasn't about whether they saw him correctly, it was about what they got from it and how it impacted them. It was for them. It was helping them in their path, in their journey, and helping them in what they needed to do in their life. So why would we think when we assimilate together and presented a one-dimensional God that that will work for us? And if some of you are still struggling with this idea of doubt as a tool, I get it, think of it like this. It was Thomas, doubting Thomas, they called him. It was in his doubt, not doubt as an unbelief, but doubt in his path that brought him to the place where he had the experience with Jesus, where Jesus says, Thomas, touch my scars, that he finds his truth. Now think about this. Thomas was with him when he performed all these miracles. He saw it firsthand, personally. He was his inner circle, his disciple. For three years, daily, he witnessed Jesus raise the dead, heal the sick, feed the masses. But yet he doubted. But it was through his doubt is how he found his truth. That's how Thomas needed to see him. They all needed to see him how they saw him because it was about them. It was about how it impacted them and how it changed them. It's doubt that pushes you deeper into the jungle. The experience of the bow elephant doesn't mean you physically see God. It means you get to a point of realization of how you see God. Which will be the way that you need to see God. This whole journey is about you having the moment you need in order to develop your truth. But you need to hear me. Part of the process of this, as I've already mentioned, is the adversity of navigating the jungle itself, the adversity of using doubt to push in to uncertainty to figure it out. And I don't mean sitting around and just thinking. I mean this is an experience of navigating your faith. And it's through this adversity is where you are formed in the journey. Peter and John learned more about Jesus and how they should see Jesus when they were going through adversity and he was there for them during those times. That is where their true relationship with Jesus was formed. It was in the adversity, it was in the struggle. As we go through the jungle, the struggle, that's where we learn what God's like. Spirituality is born out of adversity. It's not born out of religion. They're two different things. But just know whether this is going to be through controlled adversity of forcing yourself into your uncertainty, or it's going to be external adversity that's going to push you out of your comfort zone and you're going to have to choose. It is through this process I'm talking about is how you navigate it and how you find your truth, how you need to see God as you go through this that changes you and forms you into something different. So just know this is about dealing with adversity within ourselves and challenging ourselves, that we are the jungle, that we are what keeps us from the experience of the bull elephant, that it's within ourselves of what has to be navigated with doubt in order to get to this truth. And that means we have to give up certainty, certainty of things that our whole life sometimes we've held on to as truth. Everything has to be challenged, and that's hard to do, but that's the path. So now do you see what I'm saying? How can someone else's experience in their jungle finding their truth of how they need to see God become our truth of how we need to see God? But rather we should hear it as encouraging and we should hear it as the call to adventure for us. But I think that's one of the biggest problems is that when people come back and they've had this experience and they write a book, they start a movement because they've seen something that's unique and different. I mean, we don't want to go out into the jungle and find that experience ourselves. We want you to tell us about it. Write the book, we'll buy the book, speak, we'll come listen to you, we'll support you, we'll hold you up and talk about what an amazing person you are. I mean, but when you do that, that just creates a hierarchy, a pecking order in the community. And now instead of people trying to get to this place of higher understanding of their truth of how they see God, what they're doing is they're trying to get to a place of being pedestaled in the community of the hierarchy. We've placed no value on going out for the experience, and we place every bit of the value of someone that speaks like they've been in the experience. But this call to adventure is for everyone. It's what we should all be challenged to do and go find. This is our journey. This is our truth. This is how we need to figure out how we need to see God, emotionally, intellectually, mentally, and physically, in all facets, in all parts of us. It's in this journey is where we find that truth. And the reason why we're always looking for the next big thing, the next book, the next person that's gone to see the bull elephant, and we want to buy their book and posture ourselves after them and their experience is because the experience we are having is not a fulfilling one. So let's challenge ourselves to get up from the table of the community, not permanently, not leaving it like we're just being done with it, but let's get uncomfortable with ourselves out in our journey. So we can come back and we have something valid to offer. Now, how different does that community look? Rather than having a community of people coming together wanting to hear stories of other people's adventures and wanting to see God one-dimensionally, but rather you are having a group of adventures coming together that's been out into the jungle, that have something valid to offer the rest of the community. This is a community that has a more three-dimensional understanding of God together. They encourage one another to keep pushing on, they comfort one another when things get hard. And I think that is much more accurate of what it was to be to begin with. So the elephant metaphor isn't about disassembling the community, it's about transforming it through us individually. Because in the journey, you learn to love yourself correctly through God's love, which means you learn to love others correctly through God's love. I mean, this is what it's about. For us to get to that place, we have to pick up the tool of doubt. We have to be willing to get uncomfortable. We have to be willing to challenge ourselves with things that are different, and we have to be willing to push into the unknown and embrace uncertainty to discover what we truly believe and how we see God. So when we go back to our community, we are not in just a religious, ceremonious posture trying to see God in a one-dimensional way. That we collectively come together and we become hope. Thanks for joining me here on Spiritual Hot Sauce. I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out with questions, comments, andor concerns. And don't forget to like, subscribe, and review us. You can follow us on Facebook for updates and information. And if you enjoy the flavor of the sauce, then please share it with others. I would appreciate that. We'll see you next time.