Question: Right now, my world feels incredibly shaky. I’m carrying a weight that I don’t know how to put down and it’s tied to my faith – or, more accurately, the lack of it right now.

I find myself standing in a place of complete confusion. For years, I believed that there was a plan, a purpose and a protector watching over us. But looking at the pain around me that belief feels like a house of cards that just collapsed. If God is good and all-powerful, why did this happen? How am I supposed to trust a divine plan that breaks my heart? – Doubtful

Dear Friend,

What you’re describing isn’t the absence of faith. It’s faith in its hardest hour.

The book you may feel you’ve fallen out of is full of people saying exactly what you just said. Job refuses every tidy explanation his friends offer him. The psalmist demands, “How long, O Lord?” And Jesus, dying, cried out that God had forsaken him. The church never edited that line out. We kept it. We read it aloud every Good Friday. That should tell you something about what kind of house this is.

I don’t believe God authored your pain. The idea that suffering is part of a plan tries to comfort us by making God the cause of it and I would rather be honest with you: I don’t know why this happened. What I trust isn’t a plan. It’s a presence – a God who did not stay at a safe distance from our grief but climbed down into it and has not left.

So yes, something collapsed. Not your faith, I think, but a particular idea of God as a protector who prevents things. That idea falls on all of us eventually. What’s left underneath is smaller and far sturdier. Our sanctuary was built by neighbors carrying river rock up from the wash by hand. Heavy, plain, still standing.

The psalmist who cried “How long?” also wrote this: “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” He does not promise the night will be short. He promises it will end. Six centuries ago, gravely ill and in her own long night, Julian of Norwich heard the same assurance: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” She was not being cheerful. She was being faithful.

Don’t carry this alone. Call a priest, a counselor, a friend who won’t rush you. Doubt isn’t exile – and none of us walks it by ourselves. Bring it through the door. We’re in this together.

The Rev. Guy A. Leemhuis, Vicar 
St. Luke’s of the Mountains Episcopal Church in La Crescenta