I have my doubts....

I can say that I am going through a period of doubts. Now, I'm not doubting myself or my work - in fact, I feel good about what I'm doing at work, and feel that I'm making progress.  If I had any self-doubt, it would be with my ability to get other singers to understand my vision in creating a choir that would do the kind of sacred classics that I love and want to do for a small church that has no choir

No, my doubts go deep.  For you see, they are doubts about my faith.  Growing up in a faith-centered home, I was "fed" scripture, believing it to be all true: the Garden of Eden; Adam and Eve; the Great Flood; Tower of Babel.  I had no doubt in my mind back then, and even up to my college years, in the validity of stories in the Bible - specifically the Old Testament stories. But then a couple of decades ago I realized that the story of Creation and therefore Adam and Eve were myth, and most recently, I have begun to doubt the validity of the Hebrew enslavement in Egypt, and therefore, their escape from Egypt.  I have questioned why were the Hebrews the "Chosen People"?  Why did Jesus come to THEM?  And if I doubt the validity of Genesis, feeling it is mythological, then how do I account for sin?  And therefore, why did Jesus come to save us from sin?  

Now, recently I posted that I believe Jesus was and is who he said he was and is: the Son of God, and in the broader sense of the Trinity, God.  I believe that Jesus was a historical person, and the evidence of the fledgling church indicates that not only was he historical, he was EXACTLY as he said and preached.  Dying on the cross, and being resurrected were fact, not fiction.  There's too much historical evidence of an early church, plus when you evaluate human behavioral evidence, it is too strong to deny that those early Christians believed strongly in a resurrected Christ, and were willing to die and be tortured for that belief.  For them, the resurrection was not the event on Sunday morning, but the entire time Jesus continued to be with them. There may be those who discount those occurrences and try to logically explain those events as hallucinations, or psychotic episodes, which fly in the face of known psychological patterns.  You can't have 500 people hallucinating about the exact same thing at the same time.  

But even with that core truth, it's like having a building that is collapsing.  I feel as if I'm in the elevator shaft or stairwell, while the rest of the facade and floors crumble around me.  

And yet, this morning, in church, I came to the realization that all these questions really are not relevant to the Truth that I do believe in: God is, well, God.  I cannot explain him.  I cannot fathom the depths of his being. And all these questions are really dealing on trivia or peripheral items that really have little to do with God. They are all about man and his attempt to explain God, or anthropomorphize God (turning him into a more human god and therefore, more understandable).  Perhaps the authors of the Old Testament were attempting to explain something the could not. And frankly, we still can't.  And, to be honest, I PREFER a God that is mysterious, that has not revealed himself to us.  

But I still have my doubts, and still feel the need to ask and to probe.  So, I hope that those of you who read my blog will maybe join me in this journey.  Maybe we'll discover something wonderful together.