It’s not difficult to start a heated conversation at the café dinner table. Simply throw out the question of whether or not Biola’s chapel requirement is legitimate. The problem is, I’ve heard all the arguments before. The music is all the same. The chapel speakers are out of touch. Compulsion doesn’t have a place in Christianity. Yada, yada, yada.
What I have yet to hear is something honest, something real. Something I think scores of Biola students are thinking but no one dares to say.
At this school, it’s more taboo than getting knocked up or coming out of the closet. But maybe the reason many of us don’t like to go to chapel is that the words we’re mouthing aren’t really coming from our hearts.
Maybe while we’re singing, “and all will see how great, how great is our God,” we’re wondering if this God we’re serenading is even good. Or if he’s even there at all.
If we look at the great heroes of the faith, what we see in their conversations with God is frankness and honesty. David gets desperate before God — he vents. There are points in the Psalms in which he is on his knees and crying out to a God who seems absent. There are certain psalms when things never “wrap up” nicely, such as Psalm 20 At the end of all his pleas, all David hears is this deafening, devastating silence.
Then there’s Job. For forty years he wallows, wretched, crying out to this God who pillaged and pummeled him. Anyone with any sense tells him to curse God and die, but he keeps talking, giving God a piece of his mind. For forty years!
Heck, even Jesus himself doubted. As he hung on the cross, he looked up and cried to his father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Are we hearing that? He questioned God’s plan and his very goodness — and he was God himself!
In the end, God comes through and saves the day. He moves in majesty and blots out doubt. But it’s only after these men were willing to suffer through the agonizing pauses of a seemingly silent God.
Why, then, are we content to sit around our comfortable Christian university and smile this away in silence? We feel that if we say out loud, “I really can’t get over this problem of evil,” our friend might report us to the RA. We feel that if we question something about God, he’s going to topple over, and this warm fuzzy Christianity that lets us sleep at night will crumble.
And so we keep quiet. We let the doubts fester while we memorize scripture on the outside and go on our merry way through the motions. We’ll leave Biola someday, only to find that what little faith we came in with has been choked to death. It’ll be superfluous to us then.
It’s about time we got tired of pretending we’re “feeling it” if we’re not. If we plan to reach any spiritual maturity, if we want anything more than the lives we’re currently living, we’ll take the plunge and admit our doubts. We’ll let God do whatever it takes to bring us to faith — even if that means taking us through this abyss of doubt.
We’ll just own up and say it: “God, I don’t even know if you’re real. You’re going to have to help me on this one.” Trust me, He can take it.
But we’ve got to be willing to doubt in the way David and Job did — by opening all lines of communication. These men didn’t tuck away their questions, but rather expressed the good, the bad and the ugly directly to God. They were persistent. They waited on him. They wrestled with God, and they reaped the rewards.
Biola, let’s stop retreating from doubt. Let’s wrestle with it. And let the conversation begin.
