November's SJT host, Patricia, shared this article with us and asked us to reflect on doubts. The article is called "The Drawer Where I Keep my Doubts," and the author, Jeff DeGraff, writes:
"THERE’S A DRAWER IN MY STUDY that doesn’t close all the way—jammed, as if by conscience—with old notebooks, foreign coins, expired IDs, and one letter I never sent. I keep meaning to clean it out, but I don’t. Not because it’s precious, but because it’s honest. It’s where I keep things I don’t yet know what to do with. Which is to say: it’s where I keep my doubts. . . . I sometimes think of this drawer as a sort of reliquary—not of faith, but of suspended belief. It holds the relics of times when the world didn’t quite make sense, and I didn’t quite insist that it should. Times when I let the mystery remain mysterious." (Follow the link to read the rest.)
I don't have a drawer like this, but I do have sleepless hours in the middle of the night spent ruminating. The ends that happened in a way I didn't choose. The people I thought would always be my friends. The whys. "Things I don't yet know what to do with." Will I ever know?
In Jan Richardson's book The Cure for Sorrow, she writes:
Let them come:
the questions
that haunt you
in shadowy hours,
the questions
that visit
the deepest night...
You can read the whole poem here.
Questions and doubts are part of being human, especially at 2 AM. I don't think they are going anywhere. It's comforting to know I can let them come, and that God can handle them.
Here's Patricia's post! Head over to see what everyone else has posted.