on the road to the quest

This "quest" for the justifiability of the Judeo-Christian worldview isn't spawning as if in a vacuum. I'm not intellectually bored, craving some sort of scholastic stimulation. There's a reason I am here, and in seeking to determine the reason(s), I must be wary of the trap: "What caused X? Y or Z?" It's been shown, in every field of professional study, from cosmology to biology to ecology to psychology, that there are hardly ever single causes with single effects. As much as we'd like to live in a world as simple as that, the reality is that we don't, and trying to ascertain those things that have brought me to this point is challenging and humbling: I may have ideas, but in the end these reasons may or may not be legitimate. Perhaps time will tell?

Nevertheless, I've been trying to figure out precisely why I'm here (or at least trying to gain a decent vantage-point on the whole thing), and I believe that those things with which I wrestled for so long--namely, my hesitancy to embrace vocation and my difficulty in trusting God--are derived from deeper concerns regarding Christianity's validity. My hesitancy in plunging into my vocation may very well have been due to my own concerns regarding the truth of what I believed, and I didn't want to go down a life-path, in such a leadership role, with such uncertainty shadowing my every move. Personal doubts running in tandem with, and feeding off of, these uncertainties were enabled to grow, swelling into major barriers against trusting God with a growing conception of a deistic divinity. 

Depression, disappointments, empty prayers and a silence from the divine drew me first into, for a time, perceiving God as some cosmic sadist. But love and beauty would not exist if that were the case; they'd be anomalies at best. Seeing that the rain fell both on the good and the wicked, and that blessings come on both the righteous and perverse, and that one's opinion of God didn't affect the currents of one's life but, rather, simply shaped one's perception of it, I became increasingly convinced that God, if he existed at all, wasn't too involved in our world, if at all. The godless are no less fortunate than the religious are blessed, and both fall victim to the same tragedies, misfortunes, and joys that life has to offer. Statistically-speaking, one's friendship with God has no affect on the contours of one's life, but only on how we perceive our lives from the inside looking out. Where the religious see God's hand, others call it luck, fate, or destiny; whatever your take on it, neither can be verified. And seeing that we see God's hand in our lives best through hindsight, it became increasingly hammered into my mind that God was either simply not there or just didn't care. And though this is selfish, I think it makes sense: "Why devote yourself to God, why strive for him, why trust in him when he seems so apathetic, disinterested, and uncaring?"

Wrestling with my hesitancy to both trust God and go into ministry, I sought to deal with these issues, and made significant progress, before it became clear that these uncertainties, these doubts & concerns regarding the justifiability of the Judeo-Christian worldview, put a stop-gap between the wrestling with these personal hesitations and coming out on the (hoped-for) other side. I tried for quite a long time to dispel these doubts, to talk myself out of them. I kept telling myself "I know it's true, I know it's true" as if I were trying to convince myself of that fact. Perhaps lying at the heart of all my wrestling, and perhaps standing as the launching-point for this quest in the first place, are these personal doubts about God's involvement (or lack thereof) in our world. If God is involved, that's great. But if he's not, then what the hell is the point? Yes, this is something to look into, and I plan on it; but I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. I have what could be a very long journey ahead of me, and I must be patient. I'm sticking with the top-down approach of cascading assumptions because if, for instance, the assumption that God exists isn't justifiable, then this whole issue is rendered mute, and we have an easy explanation: "God doesn't seem involved simply because there's no God to be involved." If and when I get to the point of trying to understand how God works (or doesn't work) in our world, I know I must be conscious of an egotistical perception of God, of God orbiting around us rather than us around him; and I know much of this might be due to my inability to grasp the cosmic and far-reaching scope of God's plans that, quite simply, would go on with or without me; and it'd be wise to look into my assumptions about what God's love for me means, assumptions about what God cares about, assumptions about how he is--or is not--involved in our lives.

Asking how I got here is one question; asking where I want to go is another. Here we have the tension between End Goal & Desired Result. The End Goal is determining whether or not the Judeo-Christian worldview is justifiable in light of the evidence. The Desired Result is, if I can be quite honest, rejuvenation: I want the gospel to be true, I want the Judeo-Christian worldview to be a justifiable one, I want to come to have a fresh love for God and renewed direction and purpose. But I can't force myself to believe something that doesn't make sense, and though C.S. Lewis writes that he believes in Christianity because everything else makes sense by it, I am not yet to that point. Much of Christianity doesn't make sense to me, and I'm trying to figure out how to reconcile the paradoxes without doing logical gymnastics to justify my own desires. I honestly hope one day to get back to where I was: passionate about the kingdom, head-over-heels for God, energized by purpose. I want an end to this stagnation, this wandering, this emptiness. But passion can be misplaced, and maybe purpose is something we just need to create for ourselves, and being head-over-heels for something doesn't automatically validate it. Perhaps those days--and that person--are dead and gone, to never be resurrected or glimpsed again.