I’ve started to wonder if we’ve been thinking about God the wrong way.
Not as something hidden from us—but as something that lives in the very doubt we struggle with.
That idea would have frustrated me before. It still does, if I’m being honest. Because if God is real, if any of this matters, then part of me wants clarity. Something direct. Something undeniable. Not this constant questioning, this back-and-forth between belief and skepticism.
But the more I sit with it, the more I think:
What if the doubt isn’t a flaw in the system?
What if it is the system?
Because what would the alternative actually look like?
A perfect rulebook? A set of instructions so clear that no one could misunderstand them?
We already have something like that in The Bible, and look what we’ve done with it. We’ve split over it, argued over it, used it to justify things it probably wasn’t meant to justify. We’ve treated it as flawless in ways that don’t hold up under real scrutiny, and in doing so, we’ve sometimes missed whatever truth might actually be inside it.
Certainty hasn’t saved us.
If anything, it’s made us more comfortable pretending.
So maybe doubt isn’t something to eliminate.
Maybe it’s the space we’re meant to live in.
A space where:
- nothing is handed to us cleanly
- meaning has to be worked out, not memorized
- and being a “good person” isn’t about following a perfect set of rules, but about engaging honestly with the world and the people in it
That kind of space is uncomfortable.
But it’s also real.
I didn’t arrive at that idea cleanly.
I’ve had moments that felt like they should have settled everything.
After my grandfather died, I experienced something that felt like him visiting me. I still don’t know what to call it. A dream. A memory. Something my mind needed. But it didn’t feel like something I created. It felt like something I encountered.
And then there was the heart attack.
No voice. No light. No angels. Just a quiet, unmistakable sense that I wasn’t going anywhere. That something—whatever that means—was holding me in place when I could have slipped away.
Those are the kinds of moments people point to as proof.
But they didn’t give me proof.
They gave me something stranger:
Experience without certainty.
Something that felt real—and a mind that refuses to accept it without question.
So I’ve lived here, in between.
And then there’s the world.
Because even if something is there, the harder question isn’t “is it real?”
It’s:
Is it good?
There’s too much that doesn’t make sense. Too much suffering that feels random, undeserved, unresolved.
And yet—there’s also the other side.
I’ve been given a lot. More than I can easily explain. I’ve made it through things I shouldn’t have. I’ve had moments of connection, of clarity, of something that feels like more than just noise.
So I live in that tension:
Frustration and gratitude.
Doubt and something that almost feels like belief.
Both feel true.
That tension isn’t abstract for me.
I spent years angry at God.
Not in a quiet, philosophical way—but in a real, lived way.
Angry about Elizabeth. Her disease. Her pain. The unfairness of it. The randomness of it. The fact that someone I loved had to carry something that heavy.
And I didn’t know what to do with that anger.
So I let it sit.
And grow.
And harden.
I told myself it was justified—and maybe it was—but what I didn’t see at the time was what it was doing to me.
Because while I was angry, while I was trying to make sense of something that didn’t make sense, her life kept moving.
Moments happened.
Time passed.
And I missed almost all of it.
Not because I didn’t care.
But because I was afraid.
Afraid of the pain. Afraid of what I would feel if I got too close to it. Afraid of facing something I couldn’t fix.
So I stayed back.
And in doing that, I didn’t just carry anger.
I created more of my own pain.
That’s something I can’t undo.
But it’s something I can see now.
And maybe that’s part of what doubt does.
It doesn’t just ask questions about God.
It exposes how we respond to what we don’t understand.
That’s where I find myself thinking about Jesus Christ again.
Not the institution built around him. Not the certainty people speak with when they say they have everything figured out.
Just the figure at the center of the story.
The way he’s described—moving through the world, sitting with people, not avoiding pain, not stepping back from it, not waiting until things made sense before engaging.
That part stays with me.
Because if I’m honest, that’s where I fell short.
And then there are the claims.
“I am the way.”
That’s where I still hesitate.
Because I don’t see how one path, one person, one understanding can fully contain the complexity of all of this.
And then there’s the center of it all:
The resurrection.
This is where everything sharpens.
If it happened exactly as described—literally, physically—then it changes everything.
And I don’t know that I can say I believe that in a clean, certain way.
I’ve tried to force myself there before. It never sticks.
So instead, I’ve started to hold it differently.
Not as something I have to prove.
But as something pointing toward a deeper truth:
That things don’t end as cleanly as they seem.
That loss doesn’t get the final word we think it does.
That something in us pushes back against the idea of being finished.
I don’t know if that’s what happened.
But I know it resonates.
Which brings me back to where I started:
The idea that God might live in the doubt.
Because if that’s true, then this space we’re in—this tension, this questioning, this refusal to pretend certainty—isn’t distance.
It’s the environment.
The place where we have to decide:
- how we show up
- how we face pain
- whether we step in or step back
And maybe that’s where my generation comes in.
We don’t trust systems the way previous generations did. We’ve seen too much—too many contradictions, too many failures, too many institutions fall short of what they claimed to be.
So we’re left doing something different.
We’re documenting.
Not just answers, but process.
We’re writing, posting, sharing, thinking out loud—trying to make sense of things in real time instead of pretending we’ve already figured them out.
Maybe that’s our role.
Not to solve it.
But to show what it looks like to live through it honestly.
To leave something behind—not a perfect rulebook, but a record.
Of doubt.
Of questioning.
Of trying anyway.
So this Easter, I’m not claiming certainty.
I’m not rejecting belief either.
I’m standing here:
With things I regret.
With things I don’t understand.
With questions that haven’t gone away.
But also with a clearer sense of what matters.
To show up.
To not step back from the hard things.
To not let fear and anger create more distance than already exists.
And to keep moving forward—without pretending I already know where it leads.
Maybe that’s not a failure of faith.
Maybe, in some way, that is faith.
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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