Doubt

When I was at my worst, I was living in what I came to regard as a military investment. An investment is siege, in this case, of the mind. In an investment the main objective is to cut a town off from any supply route. It was like living in a donut. A contravallation of people saying mean caustic things to me.

The investment can't cut you off from your supply route to God, but it can distort it, and it can make it difficult to perceive forgiveness. I remember being on my porch looking at the back fence, and seeing Jesus on a cross, and thinking to myself, "I'd trade a few days of crucifixion for years of this any day of the week." That's what I had to do.

However, I had to reconcile my doubt, make it stop giving me the "cringey moments". The way I did this is to look at what others have said: There is no doubt without belief. I imagined my mind as a 400-acre working farm of doubt, but for that doubt to exist, there had to be something it's doubting right? That's your belief. I then studied the parables of Jesus that said the Kingdom of Heaven starts as the tiniest of mustard seeds but can grow very large. So, you could have a single seed in a 400-acre farm, but it's been planted. It has to exist. Then any further doubt was not troubling to me at all and automatically mitigated in my mind. That gave me clarity.