A Reflection by Doug Gaff
“Even in the best of times, I wrestle with faith.
Here’s a brief synopsis of my Christian journey. I was raised in an Evangelical Christian family. I love my parents, and I’m grateful for the fundamentals this upbringing taught me. But it wasn’t a fit, and as I neared the end of High School, I started to pull away from this expression of faith.
Brenda and I were occasional church goers before we got married. We found mainline Protestantism, which was different enough to feel ok. Then we moved to Boston and found First Congregational Church of Milton, where we got married and restarted our church life together.
But I wasn’t fully back as a Christian. Life at our church has been a discovery process of finding a new expression of Christianity that feels more compatible with who I am as an adult: intellectual, scientific, irreverent, and skeptical. There’s a verse I used to hear a lot as a child that has captured this journey into adulthood:
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. (1 Corinthians 13:11, NIV)
Today, I continue to wrestle with the two big questions that plague intellectual skeptics like me: 1) Does God exist, and, if so, 2) Why is the world He created so frequently horrible?
This brings me to the pandemic. Like you, there’s so much about this present existence that I despise: the sickness and death, the lack of human contact, the incompetence of response, the loss of freedom, and the unclear end. The skeptic in me, the one who yells at God regularly, just shakes his head and says, “another day in God’s creation.”
I know that’s not a very inspiring or faithful thing to say to a church audience in a time of grief, but it’s an honest part of my truth. Yet, it’s not the only part. I’m not just a skeptic. I’m also a man who wants to believe in God.
I want to believe in the God who has blessed me with my family, friends, livelihood, and health.
I want to believe in the God who created the sanctuaries in nature that make me feel alive.
I want to believe in the God who has blessed us all with a vibrant church community: a men’s group that keeps me grounded, a music program that inspires us, a Christian education program that nurtures our daughter, outreach programs that provide care to those outside our doors, and ministers who lead us through good times and bad.
More to the point, I want to believe in the God from whom I am made: a God who gets angry, who feels powerless, who make mistakes, who can’t fix everything even when He wants to.
I want to believe in a God who is fallible like me.
This God is aching with us. This God is feeling lonely. This God is wishing He could do more. This God is trying to provide solace. That’s a COVID-19 God.”
