I've spent the last 20 winter seasons on a snowboard, looking for ways to make a career out of this silly little sport.
In the course of that time I've been injured, won contests, been sponsored, been avalanched, broken more snowboards, and jumped off of more cliffs than most people ever will.
Preparing to jump off of a cliff is psychologically taxing. It has, at times, flattened me with a level of anxiety that can only be described as painful. The uncertainty of what the conditions below are like—snow stability, hidden rocks or trees, or whether or not I'll be able to control a high speed turn in a narrow run-out—would often leave me with an apprehension that, even as I write this, makes my palms sweaty and my heart race.
More recently, though, my pursuits in the mountains have changed from jumping off of cliffs to climbing up them. Of course there are also many inherent dangers in rock climbing and mountaineering to which even the most cautious are not immune. Those same feelings of uncertainty and concern can overcome me quite suddenly as I begin to encounter my mental or physical limit. Uncertainty is a fact of life in the mountains, and my time spent there has taught me how to deal with and appreciate the level of discomfort that it takes to live with such uncertainty.
Uncertainty is scary. Yet, without it, it might not be possible to live and experience life with Christ in the real and supernatural way that we so often profess.
The real problem for me is that certainty is simply not possible. Absolute certainty involves a level of knowledge that belongs only to God. And, though there are times when I selfishly and foolishly pretend to be God, I still find myself having to contend with the fact that I do not have full knowledge of the world around me. There are many times that I simply cannot say, with absolute assurance, that things are true, right, or genuine. I simply don't know; I am uncertain.
But what about Jesus?
At times, when speaking about Jesus, we project a kind of dressed up, super certainty that isn't sustainable in the real world. We've trained entire batches of young people to believe that Christ was simple, provable, and obvious, and yet, when those same young people are faced with the intellect of university or the curiosity of adulthood, they have often found Christ to be anything but.
My suspicion is that, instead of raising generations of “certainty junkies,” we might do better to demonstrate how to live the Christian life with the discomfort of not knowing everything. In fact, we might do well to understand that faith at times can exist with doubt.
An example of this is Thomas, Jesus' disciple who has been largely villainized by the moniker “Doubting Thomas.” Thomas was a courageously loyal man to Jesus (John 11:16) who, if we can believe what early church legend tells us, was put to death by the spear, a missionary martyr in India. This same Thomas, who so famously questioned the other disciples' witness of Jesus' resurrection, later made the bold exclamation of the divinity of Christ, “My Lord and my God!”
What I love about Thomas is his courage to doubt, reason, and think through the complexities of his faith, which eventually led him to a run-in with the supernatural. Scripture shows that when Thomas doubted, Jesus showed up! Jesus, instead of rejecting Thomas and banishing him from the disciples, actually honours his uncertainty by confronting him with the reality of who He was and is.
I believe in Jesus. I believe He is the Word made flesh, that He is both human and divine, is God the Father's Son who died at the hands of Roman executors and rose to life three days later. I believe He was present at Creation, and will come again with a sword to establish His kingdom and restore all that we've destroyed.
My belief brings with it a few requirements; first, I am required to have faith, which is the ability to live with the uncertainty that says I cannot possibly know everything. Second, I am required to continually wrestle with that lack of knowledge in an honest and genuine pursuit of truth and understanding. And third, I am required to have hope; a hope that somehow, despite the uncertainties, looks towards the day when Jesus proclaims, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
