Christian Doubt

This past weekend my family had a nice camping weekend planned for Fri-Mon, however things did not go as planned. After driving for about 2 hours and being 5 minutes from the camp ground, my wife looks at the reservation and realized that she reserved the wrong weekend. This is an extreme rarity as my wife is very organized (I tease her about her OCD tendencies). The camp ground is full except for one non-electric site. We got to the spot and when we got out of the van we were immediately devoured by thousands of mosquitoes. It was insane (my skin is still crawling thinking about it). Even my maximum percentage DEET bug spray didn’t work. After taking the kids to the pit toilets (yuck!) we decided to pack it up “for the sake of the kids”. We decided to try a camp ground closer to home. So back in the van for another 2 hour road trip with 7 kids who were getting fussier by the minute.

We get to the new camp ground which was very nice, modern toilets, nice sites, and the mosquitoes were more bearable–or so we thought. When the sun started setting, the mosquitoes came out in force. I don’t know if the mosquitoes this year are immune to DEET or if there was just more of them because of all the rain we have been getting, but they were just unbearable. So we decided to quickly eat some Some-mores and go to bed earlier than normal. The night was awful. Our baby was crying, our 2 year old “slept” with us, kids had to get up numerous times during the night to use the bathroom, there was a camp party some sites away, there was some sort of dog event going on so there were many dogs barking, and to top it off there was a very loud thunderstorm that unexpectedly came during the night. By morning we were tired, sticky, and mosquito bitten.

My wife and I decided to call it quits and go home on Saturday. This allowed us to go to our church service on Sunday, which we would have missed if our camping trip would have gone better. The sermon was on Matthew 7:7-11 and Asking, Seeking, and Knocking. It was a very applicable message for me.

I don’t know if it has been a decrease in my searching, a lack of desire to pray and read scripture, or just the business of summer, but I have been very successful at just ignoring my doubt recently. On one hand it has been good, because I’ve spent more time with my kids, relaxed more, enjoyed some comedy shows, etc. But on the other hand, the summer has been going by fast, and I feel like I have made no progress with my doubt.

But the sermon was good in refocusing me. Something I took out of the sermon was that I still need to be a doer. I need to ask, seek, and knock. Sure it feels like I’ve done my share of that, and God should have listen to me a long time ago, but maybe I have been so focused on what I think answers to my prayers should look like that I don’t see His answer in plain view. Maybe my pleading for faith requires this doubt. So I will try again to be more persistent in my asking, seeking, and knocking.

So, thank you mosquitoes. . . (I think?)