Sitting On the Fence

Doubt is a difficult feeling to live with. By nature we want definite answers to our questions, and would rather settle for questionable certainties than accept the existence of gray areas. Hence the popularity of fundamentalistic religions with their confident, unyielding answers to all of life's questions. However much it may require closing one's eyes to the countless nuances of real life that contradict those "straight answers," it's simply easier to maintain faith in a deity that tells you exactly what to think and do in any given situation. If those one-size-fits-all "biblical solutions" don't work, it's obviously the individual's fault - perhaps they didn't have enough faith, or didn't really want to be healed, or just plain did something wrong.

Or maybe life really is more complicated than we're comfortable admitting. Maybe God deals with each of us as individuals and not with a cookie cutter approach. Maybe one of the reasons the church seems to have so little power nowadays is because we're trying to prescribe simple, pat answers to complex issues. Maybe, as Brian McLaren might suggest, we're so busy fighting the battle of A vs. B that we've failed to notice that God is up above the battlefield entirely and not particularly interested in taking sides in our squabble.

And maybe all of those above statements apply to the debate over homosexuality. What if there's not a single, all-encompassing answer to the question of whether it's right or wrong? What if God says yes to some and no to others, based on His intimate knowledge of each of us and the millions of factors that make every person a unique individual? Are we willing to live in a place of less-than-absolute certainty? Can we accept a God who doesn't cater to our demands for absolutes that are small enough for us to fully grasp?

Does doubt really represent a lack of faith, or is a willingness to live with doubt the true act of faith? It's not so easy to trust a God whose answers sometimes raise more questions than they resolve.

I suppose this is one issue I'll eventually have to take a side on, at least in terms of how I choose to live the rest of my life. For now, though, I'll settle for uncertainty. What else can I do when I see God so clearly present on both sides of the fence? Both sides make statements that ring true to me, but both have their blind spots as well. From where I sit, to choose one and reject the other would be to cut myself off from an area where God is actively at work.

Perhaps it's time to tear down the fence altogether.