Hopeless Wanderer

I am a skeptic.  This worried me for a long time, because as much as I love God and study His word and try to live out His heart, I--doubt.  I have big doubts and little doubts.  Sometimes they pass me by, but some of them persist.

My favorite hymn is Come, Thou Fount because of this verse:

"O to grace how great a debtor daily I'm constrained to be!
Let thy goodness like a fetter, bind my wandering heart to thee
Prone to wander Lord I feel it, prone to leave the God I love
Here's my heart, O take and seal it, seal it for thy courts above"

I sing this verse with a scrunched up face, and sometimes when I'm alone I hold my hand to my chest, as if I could reach inside to clutch at my heart, forcing it to stay still.

It doesn't help to talk to people who have a (for all I can understand) supernatural gift of faith.  Liz is one of those people.  I'll flippantly mention something about, "I've always wondered about that" or "That just doesn't seem fair" or "I'm really struggling with this" and she looks at me with kindness and not a bit of understanding.  Liz isn't perfect, of course, but she doesn't struggle with doubts the way I do.  She isn't a skeptic.  So while I entrust her with my soul and get great pleasure and wisdom from being her friend, she doesn't really help in these situations.

Luckily, there are books.  Right now I'm reading Evolving in Monkey Town by Rachel Held Evans, and it is EXCELLENT.  You know, except for the part where she told my childhood of perfectionism, pietism, and generally goody two-shoes, only it was her childhood.  And she talked about knowing all the answers, and then suddenly, not.  She started wondering if there was more to Christianity than right thinking, and if apologetics and defensiveness and culture wars weren't missing the point.  She worried at the unfairness of oppressed men and women going to hell when they had been raised to believe in a false religion while she had been raised to believe in the right one.

I got a little spooked.  And a lot relieved.  She was telling my story, and she was okay.  Some of us are just naturally skeptics.  We doubt.  We can't take things easily by faith.  We wonder if there isn't something better, something missing.  But that doesn't make us wrong, and it doesn't make us not Christians, and it doesn't make God love us any less.

So when I drove to Target and Mumford and Sons' song Hopeless Wanderer came on, I sang loudly.

"I wrestled long with my youth
We tried so hard to live in the truth
But do not tell me all is fine
When I lose my head, I lose my spine
But hold me fast, Hold me fast
'Cause I'm a hopeless wanderer
And hold me fast, Hold me fast
'Cause I'm a hopeless wanderer"

This time as I sang, I didn't scrunch up my face or feel guilty or sing like I was begging God to forgive me.  This time I was smiling.  I was grinning like a madman, in fact.  I was confessing my ridiculous qualities to the God who made me with them.  I sang with the confidence that God used people with doubts, and that He would use me.  I sang knowing that He would hold me fast, and that I didn't need to worry about where my doubts would take me, because God is with me and He has heard everything a million times, and He loves me.