The Question My Grandson Circled on His Vacation Bible School Take-Home Sheet
My grandson came home from Vacation Bible School last week with a worksheet folded into fourths and shoved deep in his backpack pocket, the kind of paper that usually ends up crumpled under a car seat before anyone reads it. This one he handed to me himself, at my own kitchen table, with one line circled in blue crayon. The homework assignment read, "Ask a grown-up in your life: how do you know God is real?" He looked at me like I was about to hand him the answer to a math problem, certain, final, something he could write on the line underneath and move on to recess. I opened my mouth to give him the easy version I have given a hundred times in recovery meetings, and nothing came out right away, because some part of me that night was asking myself the same question and was not entirely sure of its own answer.
I am ten years sober, and for most of those years I believed doubt was a problem for people who had not yet had their own burning bush, their own undeniable moment. I have one of those moments. I know the exact date I stopped drinking and the exact prayer I prayed on my knees in a jail cell bathroom that night. I have told that story so many times it comes out smooth now, polished at the edges like a stone worn down by a river. What that circled question taught me again is that a man can carry a true testimony in one hand and a flicker of real doubt in the other, on the same night, at the same table, and neither one cancels the other out the way I always assumed it should.
Scripture does not treat doubt as the opposite of faith, kept at a safe distance from anyone who has already believed once. A father brought his desperate, convulsing son to Jesus and said the truest sentence in the whole Gospel of Mark, a sentence that holds both things at once without apologizing for either. "Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!'" (Mark 9:24, NKJV). He did not wait to resolve the contradiction before he spoke it out loud. He brought Jesus both halves of himself in the same breath, the believing half and the unbelieving half, and asked for help with the second one without pretending the first one had already finished the job. James describes a different kind of doubting, the restless, churning kind that never settles anywhere long enough to receive what it is asking for. "But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways" (James 1:6-8, NKJV). I have spent plenty of nights being that wave, tossed between the man who knelt in that jail cell and the man lying awake wondering if he only needed to believe something that badly to get sober at all.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once settled this for me, not fully, not permanently. I can remind myself accurately that ten years of a changed life is its own kind of evidence, that the man I was and the man sitting at this table are not the same man by any measure anyone could argue with. Every sentence is true, and none of it has ever fully quieted that one flicker that shows up some nights uninvited, because doubt was never actually a facts problem waiting on one more piece of proof. Paul names the whole arrangement plainly, not as a failure but as the actual terms we were given to live under. "For we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7, NKJV). Sight was never going to be supplied in the amount I keep wishing for. The writer of Hebrews defines faith itself in a way that assumes the thing hoped for is still, by definition, unseen. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1, NKJV). I had been asking faith to behave like sight, to remove the circled question entirely instead of answering it from somewhere I could not see.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that ten years of a good testimony could never finish producing on its own. Paul tells the Galatians where the actual waiting happens when certainty will not simply arrive on command. "For we through the Spirit eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness by faith" (Galatians 5:5, NKJV). Through the Spirit, not through finally winning an argument with my own mind at eleven at night. Paul also told a younger man he was discipling exactly what had not been handed to him in that uncertainty, and exactly what had. "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV). A sound mind in the middle of the flicker, not a mind finally free of every flicker for good. That is a peace reasoning never built and reasoning was never going to be able to dismantle either.
I told my grandson the truth that night, the short version he could actually use. I told him I know God is real because of who I used to be and who I am not anymore, and because some nights I still have to ask God to help the one percent of me that wonders, the same way that father did, and He always does. He wrote something close to that on his line and went back to his cartoons, satisfied in the uncomplicated way only an eight year old can be. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which question is circled on your own page right now, which honest flicker you have been too ashamed to say out loud next to your own true testimony. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you arriving at certainty first, and He will never leave you alone with that wave, however long it takes before it settles.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Mark 9:24; James 1:6-8; 2 Corinthians 5:7; Hebrews 11:1; Galatians 5:5; 2 Timothy 1:7.
I am ten years sober, and for most of those years I believed doubt was a problem for people who had not yet had their own burning bush, their own undeniable moment. I have one of those moments. I know the exact date I stopped drinking and the exact prayer I prayed on my knees in a jail cell bathroom that night. I have told that story so many times it comes out smooth now, polished at the edges like a stone worn down by a river. What that circled question taught me again is that a man can carry a true testimony in one hand and a flicker of real doubt in the other, on the same night, at the same table, and neither one cancels the other out the way I always assumed it should.
Scripture does not treat doubt as the opposite of faith, kept at a safe distance from anyone who has already believed once. A father brought his desperate, convulsing son to Jesus and said the truest sentence in the whole Gospel of Mark, a sentence that holds both things at once without apologizing for either. "Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!'" (Mark 9:24, NKJV). He did not wait to resolve the contradiction before he spoke it out loud. He brought Jesus both halves of himself in the same breath, the believing half and the unbelieving half, and asked for help with the second one without pretending the first one had already finished the job. James describes a different kind of doubting, the restless, churning kind that never settles anywhere long enough to receive what it is asking for. "But let him ask in faith, with no doubting, for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea driven and tossed by the wind. For let not that man suppose that he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all his ways" (James 1:6-8, NKJV). I have spent plenty of nights being that wave, tossed between the man who knelt in that jail cell and the man lying awake wondering if he only needed to believe something that badly to get sober at all.
Here is where my own reasoning has never once settled this for me, not fully, not permanently. I can remind myself accurately that ten years of a changed life is its own kind of evidence, that the man I was and the man sitting at this table are not the same man by any measure anyone could argue with. Every sentence is true, and none of it has ever fully quieted that one flicker that shows up some nights uninvited, because doubt was never actually a facts problem waiting on one more piece of proof. Paul names the whole arrangement plainly, not as a failure but as the actual terms we were given to live under. "For we walk by faith, not by sight" (2 Corinthians 5:7, NKJV). Sight was never going to be supplied in the amount I keep wishing for. The writer of Hebrews defines faith itself in a way that assumes the thing hoped for is still, by definition, unseen. "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1, NKJV). I had been asking faith to behave like sight, to remove the circled question entirely instead of answering it from somewhere I could not see.
This is exactly what abiding in the Spirit offers that ten years of a good testimony could never finish producing on its own. Paul tells the Galatians where the actual waiting happens when certainty will not simply arrive on command. "For we through the Spirit eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness by faith" (Galatians 5:5, NKJV). Through the Spirit, not through finally winning an argument with my own mind at eleven at night. Paul also told a younger man he was discipling exactly what had not been handed to him in that uncertainty, and exactly what had. "For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind" (2 Timothy 1:7, NKJV). A sound mind in the middle of the flicker, not a mind finally free of every flicker for good. That is a peace reasoning never built and reasoning was never going to be able to dismantle either.
I told my grandson the truth that night, the short version he could actually use. I told him I know God is real because of who I used to be and who I am not anymore, and because some nights I still have to ask God to help the one percent of me that wonders, the same way that father did, and He always does. He wrote something close to that on his line and went back to his cartoons, satisfied in the uncomplicated way only an eight year old can be. God is alive tonight, and He already knows exactly which question is circled on your own page right now, which honest flicker you have been too ashamed to say out loud next to your own true testimony. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on you arriving at certainty first, and He will never leave you alone with that wave, however long it takes before it settles.
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Scriptures used (NKJV): Mark 9:24; James 1:6-8; 2 Corinthians 5:7; Hebrews 11:1; Galatians 5:5; 2 Timothy 1:7.
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