The Gift of Doubt

I want to talk for a moment about the gift of doubt. We often assume that if we had a perfect knowledge of things, then life would be so much easier. This might be the case if we were also perfect in all other aspects of our lives, but to be cursed with a perfect knowledge while still possessing all of our same weaknesses and flaws and imperfections would literally be hell. We would make no effort to do what is right if we had a perfect knowledge that failure awaited us. There’s a story of a professor who had put a math problem on the board and explained to his students that this was a famous, impossible to solve equation. One of the students came in late and missed the first part of the lecture about the problem being impossible and copied down the problem assuming that it was his task to solve the problem. And he did. He may have had doubts about his mathematical skills, but he also had doubts about the impossibility of the equation to be solved. He didn’t know it was impossible so he kept working at it and found a solution. We may sometimes hate how much we struggle with our doubts, but without doubt, faith would not be possible. We would not attempt to do good things if we had a full knowledge of the impossibility of our task. But because we have doubt, we can have faith, and we can rely on the Lord’s strength and wisdom rather than our own and do impossible things.