In a world filled with so much hurt, there is not time for self-wallowing nor self-doubt. It's unfortunate that it sometimes takes learning of other people's pains, frustrations, and grief to snap me out of the two previously mentioned toxicities. However, I have been in such a season lately, and it wasn't until today--learning about an unexpected death in one family from home and a frustrating/heartbreaking diagnosis in another--that it occurred to me that my preoccupation with doubt was distracting me from the rest of life.

When I'm distracted from everything else--all of the life and everything that comes with it happening around me--I'm not being obedient to God in caring for creation, in living out that "We belong to one another" mentality I've mentioned before from the book of Romans, for exuding hope and love in a world that is broken and searching for the light.

A wise woman has been preaching to me (and to the rest of our congregation) that our self-doubt prevents God's creativity and grace from doing what God desires for these gifts to do: work through us to ease the suffering of those in our midst and beyond it. We have each been given gifts for carrying out the vocations to which we have been called, and must trust that God goes with us and will give us what we need to fulfill said vocations--not by our own ability, but by God's transformative and grace-filled power working within us.

I cannot speak for you, but for me, it's time to stop doubting myself and start trusting that God goes with me and gives me strength for this journey called life so that my life might be a vessel through which God's grace and mercy and healing and comfort can flow.

A little excerpt from Thomas Merton helped me along with this thought process/verbal expression of need for repentance (read: turning back to God) this morning. I hope it speaks to your heart as well:

"This is where so many holy people break down and go to pieces. As soon as they reach the point where they can no longer see the way and guide themselves by their own light, they refuse to go any further. They have no confidence in anyone except themselves. Their faith is largely an emotional illusion. It is rooted in their feelings, in their physique, in their temperament. It is a kind of natural optimism that is stimulated by moral activity and warmed by the approval of other [people]. If people oppose it, this kind of faith still finds refuge in self-complacency. But when the time comes to enter the darkness in which we are naked and helpless and alone; in which we see the insufficiency of our greatest strength and the hollowness of our strongest virtues; in which we have nothing of our own to rely on, and nothing in our nature to support us, and nothing in the world to guide us or give us light--then we find out whether or not we live by faith. It is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find our true liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure."