I’m Not Sure I Believe It Anymore

I need to clear something up about Thomas before we start, because he’s been slandered for two thousand years and the slander is going to get in the way.

The first thing he ever says in the record is this.

Jesus decides to go back into Judea, where a crowd had recently tried to stone him to death. The other men point that out. It’s a bad idea and they say so.

And Thomas says: Let us also go, that we may die with him.

That’s your doubter. A man who assumed the trip would kill all of them and voted to go anyway.

The second thing he says is at the last supper, when Jesus is talking about going somewhere and preparing a place, and everyone in that room is nodding along the way people do when they have no idea what’s being said.

Thomas raises his hand.

Lord, we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?

Somebody had to say it, and he was not the only one who did. Peter had asked a version of it a chapter earlier and Philip asks one a few verses later. But it’s Thomas who says the flat thing, that he does not know where any of this is going.

And that question is the reason we have the answer. I am the way and the truth and the life. One of the most quoted sentences in human history exists because a man was willing to say he didn’t understand.

Thomas is not the weak one. Thomas is the one who won’t fake it.

Keep that in your head, because it’s about to matter.

Now, the resurrection.

Now Thomas, one of the Twelve, was not with the disciples when Jesus came.

He wasn’t there.

That’s how the whole thing starts and it’s the part nobody preaches. Before there was any doubting, there was an absence. The rest of them were in a room and something happened and Thomas was somewhere else.

We’re not told why. Out walking. Couldn’t stand the company. Grieving in his own way, which some people have to do alone. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the rest of them had an experience and he did not have it, and then they came and told him about it.

We have seen the Lord!

And he’s supposed to build a life on their report.

I’d like you to notice how exactly that is your situation.

Everybody around you seems to have had something you didn’t get.

Your spouse has it. Your sister has it. The person at work who plays music in the truck all day has it. They talk about it like it’s obvious, like it’s weather, and somewhere in the last twenty years you stopped being able to say that whatever they have, you don’t have it, and you’re not sure you ever did.

And you have been faking a version of it at funerals and weddings and Christmas dinners for a long time.

I learned to do that early, and I want to tell you where, because I don’t think it started when you think it started.

The church I came up in had no place to put a question. Not a hard question. Any question. The answer to why was that God said so, and the answer to what about this part was that you weren’t to worry about that part. Asking wasn’t a stage a boy went through on his way to being solid. It was the first sign of a problem.

I was nine or ten years old with a head full of questions and a very clear understanding that the questions themselves were the danger.

So I did what a bright kid does in that spot. I learned to look like a boy who didn’t have any.

And I got good at it. So good that by fourteen I was standing in front of rooms, and by twenty-five I was on a staff, and somewhere around forty I could not have told you with any confidence which parts I actually believed and which parts I had been performing since I was a child.

If any of that is your story, then hear what it means, because it lets you off a hook you’ve been on for a long time.

You didn’t start faking it when you lost your faith. You were taught to fake it while you still had it. The performing came first. It was a survival skill, it worked, and nobody ever told you to stop.

A person can keep that up for forty years. And it is exhausting in a way that nobody around them can see.

There’s an image I’ve never been able to shake about those years. The little wind-up monkey on a stage, clanging the cymbals together, and the room applauding.

That was me. The preaching got applauded. The leading got rewarded. So I did more of it, and the parts of me that weren’t the monkey never really finished growing, because nobody was clapping for those and there wasn’t time.

Alice Miller wrote a book called The Drama of the Gifted Child. I read it years later as a psychologist and it was a description of my adolescence. A capable kid learns what the adults around him need, becomes extremely good at producing it, gets loved for the production, and quietly loses track of what he actually is underneath it.

Looking back on it now, it was sick. I don’t know a gentler word and I’ve looked for one.

By my early thirties I’d hit the top of it. I was being recruited by national ministries and by some of the largest churches in America, and I could not do it. Not because I’d stopped believing. Because I could not face being that man in a bigger building in a bigger city, and because there was no permission anywhere in that world to sit in a hard place and struggle toward an answer without having the answer already.

So I got out. Not in disgrace. At the top, on my own, because the alternative was doing it for another twenty years.

Years later, when my own daughters were fourteen, I asked my parents how they let that happen to me.

My dad said: We didn’t know. Were we supposed to argue with God?

I want you to sit with that answer, because it’s the most important sentence in this book about how any of this happens.

That is not a villain talking. That’s a good man who loved his son, being handed a system where the question itself was the transgression, and doing exactly what he was told was right.

Nobody in my story was the bad guy. That’s why it worked so well and why it took so long to see.

If you’ve been waiting for somebody to be at fault before you can put this down, you may be waiting on something that isn’t there.

Thomas didn’t fake it.

Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.

That’s flat. That’s a man saying the true thing to a room of people who had every reason to be offended by it, and the fact that he said it to their faces instead of nodding along is the single most respectable thing in the chapter.

Now here’s the detail I want you to carry out of this book, and it’s one word.

A week later his disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.

A week.

A week goes by between the announcement and anything happening. A week where the rest of them are lit up about something Thomas thinks is probably grief doing what grief does. A week of listening to it at every meal.

And Thomas was with them.

He stayed.

He didn’t believe a word of it and he did not leave the house. He sat in a room with people whose testimony he had publicly rejected, for a week, and ate with them, and let them talk.

That is the whole instruction of this chapter and it’s the opposite of what you’ve been doing.

You left the room because you stopped believing. You assumed that was the honest thing, that staying would have been hypocrisy, that a person who doesn’t have it has no business sitting among people who do.

Thomas stayed in the room without it.

And that is where he was standing when it happened.

Then Jesus walks in, and the first thing he does is turn to Thomas.

Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe.

Read the front of that against what Thomas had said. The finger. The hand. The side. He takes the man’s own terms and hands them back clause by clause and offers to meet every one of them.

And then at the end he tells him to quit it.

Notice the order, because the order is the entire thing. He met the demand first and corrected him second. Every person who ever quoted this passage at you did it the other way around.

The demand was met.

And then, and this is the part that gets me every time, there’s no record he actually touched him. And two verses later Jesus says because you have seen me, not because you put your hand anywhere.

The text doesn’t say he did. What it says next is that Thomas answered him, and what he answered is the highest thing anybody says about Jesus in that entire gospel.

My Lord and my God.

Nobody else in that gospel says it. Not Peter, not Martha, not Nathanael. They get close and they stop short. The furthest confession in the book comes out of the mouth of the man who was not there and would not pretend.

One more thing, because you know the next line and you’re bracing for it.

Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.

That is not the point of the verse, and it can’t be aimed at Thomas, because it comes about four seconds after Jesus crossed a room specifically to accommodate him.

He wasn’t correcting the man in front of him. He was talking about everybody after, which is you, and the whole point is that you don’t get the same offer of a hand in a side and it’s still available to you anyway.

But notice he only said it after he’d fully given Thomas what Thomas asked for.

He accommodated the doubt first and commented on it second. Most of the people who quoted that verse at you did it in the opposite order.

Here’s your move, and it’s the hardest small thing in this book so far.

Say it out loud to one person.

Not to God this time. To a human being with a face.

One sentence: I don’t know if I believe any of this anymore.

Pick somebody who won’t try to fix it in the first ten seconds. That rules out most people, and you already know which one it is. It might be your spouse. It might be somebody you’ve known forty years. It might be somebody you’d have to call.

Do not build a case. Don’t explain the reasons. The reasons are not the point and offering them turns it into a debate, and you’ll win the debate and feel worse.

Just say the sentence and let it sit in the air.

Because the thing about faking it for twenty years is that it’s lonely in a way you’ve stopped being able to feel. You’ve been in rooms full of people you couldn’t tell the truth to, and the not-telling has cost you more than the not-believing ever did.

Thomas said his out loud, to ten friends, and then stayed for supper.

Eight days later he was standing in exactly the right place.