{"id":662,"date":"2011-01-07T09:06:46","date_gmt":"2011-01-07T09:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/omeoflittlefaith\/2011\/01\/sarah-cunningham-doubt.html"},"modified":"2011-01-07T09:06:46","modified_gmt":"2011-01-07T09:06:46","slug":"sarah-cunningham-doubt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/omeoflittlefaith\/2011\/01\/sarah-cunningham-doubt.html","title":{"rendered":"Sarah Cunningham: Doubt as a Hook"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sarahcunningham.jpg\"<\/span><\/p>\n

Sarah Cunningham<\/b> and I first got to know each other when I interviewed her<\/a> upon the release of her latest book, Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life’s Weeds<\/a><\/i>. It’s an excellent memoir. Sarah is a social activist, a former church staffer, and currently a high school teacher in Michigan. We share a publisher at Zondervan and I’m happy to count Sarah as one of those online friends whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in real life. <\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Did I mention, by the way, that she’s an excellent writer?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Happy to have Sarah join the ranks of the Voices of Doubt…<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
————-<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
I was born with a resistant streak.<\/b>
\nMy first word was “no.”<\/p>\n

My first sentence was “I amn’t gonna do it.”<\/p>\n

I once cut all the kids in line at the mall just to tell Santa I didn’t believe he was real.
\n(He needed to know so he could get on with making a respectable living.)<\/p>\n

Some people might say all this nay-saying makes me a born doubter. But I think, all things considered, it made me a born believer.<\/p>\n

Because for me, even in childhood, doubt quickly became the best indicator that I actually gave a crap. If someone passed on a spiritual insight to me and I swallowed it immediately, there was a good chance:<\/p>\n

A. I didn’t think it was important<\/p><\/div>\n

or<\/div>\n
B. I didn’t care<\/p>\n

But if I bothered mulling a new idea over, rolling it around in my mind and sifting it with suspicion?<\/p>\n

I was engaged.<\/p>\n

I was invested.<\/p>\n

And the fact that I gave energy to examining it in the first place meant I sensed something important was at stake.<\/p>\n

For me, then, doubt became the hook, the lure of understanding the unseen, that reeled me into faith.<\/p>\n

Because of this, I tend to see doubt and faith as equal partners in a God-intended spiritual process.<\/p>\n

After all, if the spiritual world wasn’t big and deep and transformative enough to challenge the literal world, there would be no reason to refer to it as “faith.”<\/p>\n

Without stuff so epic it stirs doubt, there’s nothing to have faith in.<\/p>\n

Without doubt to push through, it’s just facts and knowledge.<\/p>\n

And if that were God’s intention, I suspect he would’ve handed us an encyclopedia instead of Jesus.<\/p>\n

Instead, I think of faith and doubt as both being part of a natural system of the soul.
\nOur soul takes in a lot of information, a lot of which people claim are spiritual insights.<\/p>\n

That Jesus is Lord.<\/p>\n

That he rose from the dead.<\/p>\n

That females who cut their hair are going to hell.<\/p>\n

That cult followers should let their under-age daughters sleep with the community “prophet.”<\/p>\n

Adopting a spirit of belief toward anything and everything people tell you is of God, of course, is not necessarily a sign of faith. Sometimes, as with a couple of the examples above, it’s a sign of confusion.<\/p>\n

So you have to expel some things. Faith has to be nurtured by right beliefs, but the soul functions best when we discard unhealthy ideas.<\/p>\n

In light of this, I’ve come to picture doubt as the process that helps us push dysfunctional information out of our souls.<\/p>\n

If you only believe in faith, and never doubt anything, it makes no sense. You’d be like a person who just eats whatever they come across, with no regard for whether the amount or content could make them sick. No one who eats everything stays healthy.<\/p>\n

In the same way, if you always choose a posture of doubt, this too gets ridiculous.
\nYou become like the person who doesn’t believe in the value of any type of food and thus starves to death.<\/p>\n

A healthy faith, then, continues to seek, to take in new and deeper insights to fuel growth, but it never stops doubt from doing the needed sifting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

————-<\/p>\n

Thank you, Sarah.<\/b> Keep up with Sarah on Twitter<\/a>, on Facebook<\/a>, or via her blog<\/a>. And if you haven’t read her book Picking Dandelions<\/i><\/a>, you should. Right now.<\/p>\n

Previous posts in the “Voices of Doubt” series…<\/b><\/p>\n

\u2022 Shawn Smucker: Doubt as Discovery<\/a>
\u2022 Jamie Wright: A Born Doubter<\/a>
\u2022 Trudy Morgan-Cole: The Squirmin’ Herman of Doubt<\/a>
\u2022 David Sessions: The Hard Work of Faith<\/a>
\u2022 Dean Nelson: Test Everything<\/a>
\u2022 Carlene Bauer: Prodigal Daughter<\/a>
\u2022 Larry Shallenberger: The Knight and the Fortune Cookie<\/a>
\u2022 David Dark on Sacred Questioning<\/a>
\u2022 Cara Davis: A Textbook Case<\/a>
\u2022 Matthew Paul Turner: Letting Them See My Doubt<\/a>
\u2022 Sally Lloyd-Jones: Where Did You Put Your Faith?<\/a>
\u2022 Chad Gibbs: When It Doesn’t Seem Fair<\/a>
\u2022 Leeana Tankersley: The Swirling Waters<\/a>
\u2022 Robert Cargill: The Skeptic in the Sanctuary<\/a>
\u2022 Dana Ellis: Haunted by Questions<\/a>
\u2022 Rachel Held Evans on Works-Based Salvation<\/a>
\u2022 Winn Collier: Doubt Better<\/a>
\u2022 Tyler Clark on Losing Fear, Losing Faith<\/a>
\u2022 Rob Stennett on the Genesis of Doubt<\/a>
\u2022 Adam Ellis on Hoping That It’s True<\/a>
\u2022 Nicole Wick on Breaking Up with God<\/a>
\u2022 Anna Broadway on Doubt and Marriage<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sarah Cunningham and I first got to know each other when I interviewed her upon the release of her latest book, Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life’s Weeds. It’s an excellent memoir. Sarah is a social activist, a former church staffer, and currently a high school teacher in Michigan. We share a publisher…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":84,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,60],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-662","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guests","category-voices-of-doubt"],"yoast_head":"\nSarah Cunningham: Doubt as a Hook - O Me of Little Faith<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/omeoflittlefaith\/2011\/01\/sarah-cunningham-doubt.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sarah Cunningham: Doubt as a Hook - O Me of Little Faith\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Sarah Cunningham and I first got to know each other when I interviewed her upon the release of her latest book, Picking Dandelions: A Search for Eden Among Life’s Weeds. 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