From INHERITANCE Issue #1 - Spring 2009

Losing faith. I can feel it coming for months. It’s an eerie feeling.

It seems like I’ve lost and found my faith several times in my life. It feels like you’re losing your mind, but it’s really your faith in God that’s slipping away. However, after one of these events, I come to understand who God is in a totally new light, deeper than before, without all of the religious clutter that I had built up for years. It’s like a spiritual detox, removing religious filth that substituted for real faith.

These “faith crises,” growing pains, or whatever you call them, usually happen along with some sort of major transition in my life, when the previous version of faith no longer can make any sense of what the new situation is all about.

It’s like God telling me, “You think you have it all figured out but you haven’t got a clue.”

There have been so many of them since the first one, but I wanted to share with you just a couple of the ones that I really treasure.

Is my Faith mine?
My first big one happened when I was in high school. I grew up in the church all my life so my conversion was nothing sexy to share about. I was a church-going “goody two-shoes,” A and B student, and mama’s boy. 

During freshman year, at my first youth retreat, I had an emotional experience of “receiving Jesus into my heart.” I was on a spiritual high until the end of my sophomore year. I was a “Jesus freak,” practically living at church.

Then the unexpected happened in junior year: my youth pastor left. He had been with us since I was in eighth grade and now he was gone. He had been like a father to me.

My own father was your typical emotionally-absent, passive-aggressive Asian dad, except in my father’s case, he was intimidatingly and violently passive-aggressive.

Now with my youth pastor gone, I felt lost, and that’s when my first faith crisis came.

After he left, I realized that my faith was purely emotional and experiential. I never thought about what I believed, and when I started thinking, there was no way to stop the questions.

The most fundamental question was this: Was I a Christian because I was born in a Christian home? I mean, would I have been a Muslim if I was born in a Muslim home? Or a Buddhist out of a Buddhist home? If that’s what faith was all about, then what was the point?

I’d just be a product of my upbringing. There would be no real Truth.

I realized that I could either deal honestly with my doubts and possibly end up a pagan, losing Christmas and all, or just fudge it and consider myself a Christian by default, simply because I wasn’t anything else.
Thank God, I chose the former route.

Throughout the whole year, I told myself that if God was real, God would lead me out of this hole.
In the end, reading C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity finally led me back to God by helping me think through what I actually believed.

I realized that previously, even with my cathartic conversion experience with tears and all, my faith wasn’t really mine. I had just borrowed my youth pastor’s faith, and when he left, I was left without my own faith.

My struggle for faith made it my own. Now that it was mine, I would have been prepared to profess my faith in Christ, even if my family was not Christian. I never would have found God if I had never lost my faith.

Is God Good?
The second big one came a couple of years out of college when I left my engineering job to join campus ministry staff. The first two years were pretty tumultuous, but things finally settled down and all was going well — praise team, small groups, large groups, and leadership training — until my friend’s father passed away.
Being at his funeral did something to me. I got depressed, but I wasn’t really sure what about.

Then another funeral occurred — this time, for a distant family member. This funeral put me over the edge.

I felt that I could no longer believe that God was good. Life seemed so arbitrary. I realized that I had always had this question deep down inside of me, but I never allowed myself to express it. I was Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit hole. I didn’t think I would ever come out it.

What if God was some sadistic tyrant who liked arbitrary suffering? Someone who just did whatever pleased Him — a power-mongering Egomaniac?! Because He is all-powerful, no one would even be able to stop Him.

When I was all but ready to confess my apostasy, God blindsided me with a very simple point about Abraham and Isaac.

God did not allow Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, but instead, He interceded and provided a ram just in time. I was upset at God for not interceding in the same way when we needed Him.

When we are in a desperate situation like Abraham’s, shouldn’t God come through with a ram? Why doesn’t God do the same for all suffering people?

Struggling with this question, I began to wonder: Who intercedes for God? For instance, who interceded for God on the cross? No one. No one can intercede for God. That’s the point. In the end, He is responsible for everything and He pays the price. The buck stops with Him.

Whatever I could accuse God of, I couldn’t say that He was a power-abusing tyrant, because tyrants don’t willingly let others kill him. The cross reveals the kind of God we have — a God who wields power in weakness. He would rather die than abuse his power.

That’s the heart of God’s goodness. He is a different kind of a Person from us altogether. All His absolute, sovereign power does not corrupt him. He is holy, not like us.

The pain uncovered my deep doubt and thinking back, I’m glad that it did. I don’t think I really ever trusted God before, and I never truly believed in God’s goodness until that point.

Of course, I always knew what I was supposed to believe, but that’s wasn’t what I actually believed. By being brutally honest with myself and with God, I came to know and trust in His goodness.

Who am I?
The last big one came at the end of my seminary days. Through a number of events, I felt that God was calling me, or perhaps dragging me, back to the Asian church.

At the time, I had not been to an Asian church for about twelve years for various reasons. I had never liked its hierarchy, legalism, and obsession over passion and commitment. I especially didn’t like the false association that being a good Christian meant being a good Asian, and vice versa.

I had left my Asian culture in search of a better career. My seminary goals were slightly unconventional in that I wanted to be a seminary professor. I was going to be a scholar and gain prestige and accolades for me and my family.

As such, I avoided the Asian church, fearing the effect that its dysfunctional mess would have on me. I was seeking a religious career, ignoring God’s calling.

Having since embraced my call to the Asian church, I now look back and realize that God was leading me to own my Asian-ness.

I had never really liked my Asian identity and really wanted to ignore it all together, but by rejecting it, I was losing a part of myself. I see now that God wanted to bring all of these parts of myself together.

By losing my career, not only did I gain a calling, but I gained my whole self as well. Since then, following this calling has been a struggle, even painful at times. I think bicultural identity is like that for most people, but I feel that I am headed in the right direction, bringing all of myself under God’s care, love, and acceptance.

What I have learned from these crises is this: When my faith feels like it’s slipping away, God is revealing a lie that I have come to live by. It may be a very pious-sounding lie, but it is a lie nonetheless.

At times like that, by being painfully honest with myself and losing my religion, I meet God. Like the Psalmist, I need to be raw in God’s presence. I know I’ll always lose when I fight with God, but I think that’s what faith is about ... losing faith and finding God.