This is where I've come.
We all go through a process in our life. We come into this life with a Born Belief. We are born into an environment, hopefully a family, that already has an established set of beliefs. Maybe we believe in God, maybe He’s a personal God, maybe He’s a distant God. And then there’s Jesus, and there are all kinds of opinions about who He was and is. As we grow older we start to explore if that set of beliefs still works for us. We push the envelope. We question our footing, and we start to settle into that belief that helps us make sense of our world. It helps us form judgments, decisions, and behavior. We get comfortable with it, and it helps us form our identity. Often this early belief is inflexible, black and white; we expect that life will continue in this a+b=c pattern.
But at some point, your belief set gets challenged. You enter into a season of Broken Belief. This is where the Gray sets in - where something so painful happens to you that you find yourself stumbling around in a fog, wrestling through your feelings and your thoughts toward God - a God you thought was there to protect you from bad stuff. This is Jonah’s Whale. This is Daniel’s Den. This is Jesus on the Cross yelling “My God, Why Have You Forsaken Me?”.
Maybe my experience is your loss of a family member or a friend, expected or sudden. Maybe it’s a string of disappointments that have beat you down into the dirt. Maybe it’s that betrayal of trust you never thought would ever happen to you. Some people stay in the Gray - in this Broken Belief state.
Don’t downplay or deny God’s role in your pain. It’s right there in scripture. It is not new. The questions, the feelings of betrayal, the pain, the heartache, the loss - none of it new. But in all of it, God is still there. In your life before the Grey, in your life during it, and now with your new understanding of life's twists and turns, He is there... richer and more real than He was before.
This whole living thing is tough stuff. Even Jesus was pushed to the point where He asked God why. But He got through the cross and fulfilled a beautiful destiny, one that is the inspiration of our faith 2000 years later. When you really understand that, internalize it, you’ve entered into your Beginning Belief, where your faith becomes an active part of who you are and your real identity comes into focus. You've learned what it means to own your faith because you embraced the Gray.