This article is for the person that wants to believe but does not know how. I am trying to help you understand so you can heal the relationship you need most in life. God. He made us to desire Him. A hole in our heart that only He can fill. Pastors in general were unable to help me because they had not walked in my shoes (they had a life experience different than my own which provided fertile ground for my doubt to grow).
Understanding how doubt grows plays a huge role in healing. I pray this helps you.
Pastors, how many people in your congregations are like me? We need your help. I hope my story helps you reach them.
How did your brain’s development impact your belief in God?
If you do not believe in God, I believe the answer lies in your life experience. I am hoping my sharing will lead you to better understand the source of your doubt. Is it purely the way your brain analytically functions, or did you experience things in your life that tie into your emotions causing doubt?
In my book Proving God Proving Jesus I discussed worldview and the impact others can have on our belief in God. But I missed something. I did not understand the impact of how our brain functions and its development impacting how we process our worldview – our perception of reality based upon our life experiences.
I felt like an outsider in the church. I needed evidence. But they didn’t. That was what I felt. They did not understand me, but I did not understand myself well enough to understand why I needed evidence.
The church typically presumes that preaching the Word is enough to reach the lost. They can explain what the Bible says but they are weak in being able to defend it.
40 years ago, I put a pastor on the spot with questions he could not answer related to the evidence for our faith. 40 years later I have the answers I needed and more. I would like to share some of my answers with you because I believe my story may help some of you understand yourself.
One of the missing pieces of the puzzle, for me, I did not know until the last few months.
I recently read a book (The Other Half of Church – Wilder and Hendricks) that discussed how the brain functions. The right brain is more relational (love and emotions) in focus. It is where our identity, character and relational connections to God and people are formed. The focus of the left brain is logical thinking, problem solving, and language. In my relationship with God, I have always been more left brain focused in my thinking. Always looking for evidence while overlooking the emotional impact of my development in connecting to God as the driver inside of me. I now see how both sides of the brain played a key role in my journey.
Some of us are born with more analytical brains. Those people are more at risk of unbelief if they did not get the right brain relational development they needed as a child.
So, I feel if our right brain is functioning properly, we have the relational connections we need to better respond to the truth of Christianity. If your life experience has impacted your right brain negatively you may be more like me needing more evidence.
To resolve your unbelief, you need to heal both sides of your brain. You need to understand the roots of your unbelief.
As a child I experienced things that impacted my emotional development. My father was the key figure. He was unable to express love to me. He was critical of me. He was verbally abusive to my mother and questioned her intellect. So, I had no father that I trusted as a child.
Church was also a mess because my mother a Catholic married a Protestant that had divorced a Catholic.
My mother was negatively viewed as an adulteress by the priest and could not go to communion. As a child I sat next to her year after year in the pew as she was unable to go to communion. I knew she was good. As good as anyone else. I deeply identified with her. What did that make me? Angry. It made me so angry. So, I sat with her in church feeling she was abused by my father and by the priest. I hated the priest (I finish this story in another article titled A Good Catholic Priest).
I had nowhere to turn as a child. I could not talk with my mom about my feelings who, according to my dad, was stupid. I was afraid of my father and hated the priest. I had to go it alone in directing my life.
How do you love and trust a Father you cannot see if the father you could see did not provide you with love? How do you trust God if you view the priest that represents him as your enemy? My mother’s love was what kept me from becoming a hateful person.
I relied upon my analytical capabilities to navigate through life.
What I did not learn until recently was how much the right-side brain development impacts our relationship with God. It is the right side that manages our relational connectedness too people and God. The right side is heavily impacted by imagery, so a parent’s joyful facial expressions play a key role in forming that child’s identity. Something as simple as a smile has a huge impact on our brain. It sends a message of joy and love. A child understands expressions before it can understand words. That smile is a foundation stone in that child’s brain. It feeds the formation of our character. It helps us believe in a loving God that we can trust.
Look to your childhood if you are having problems loving and trusting God. That was me.
The lack of that smile from my father created a void in my life. It deeply impacted my relational development. That impacted my feelings about God. How can you feel God? There is something I needed that I lacked.
One time I heard a Christian speaker who was deeply moving emotionally a group of 30-40 people with his words. The people had all been standing but ended up on their knees or laying on the floor at the power of the Spirit. For me, I stood looking at one other person who was also standing, and I could tell she was as perplexed as me at what the others felt. We are designed to feel God’s presence according to Wilder and the right brain governs that. But my right brain relational circuits got messed up and I have no doubt her relational circuits were too.
If you are struggling with that. I recommend the book The Other Half of Church as a starting point in understanding this.
What was given to me as a child was my mother’s gift of faith. She deeply believed. She was deeply wounded by her inability to go to communion. She was not intellectually very smart. But she was so kind and loving and I identified with her and her love of God. She suffered so much. I grieved for my mother. She was why I went to church. She buried her love for Jesus as a seed deep inside of me. So, when my analytical side took over as a teenager and I questioned intellectually my faith, the desire for Jesus that mom planted never left me. It was firmly anchored. I was never able to let go of the search for evidence of Him. I wanted evidence because I wanted Him. Thank you, my wonderful mother – who I will see again in heaven. And I have learned to forgive my father for his inability to show me the love I needed from him. He did not understand and I am sure he had issues internally he never resolved from his childhood.
If you can relate to childhood baggage impacting your relationship with God, then that is progress. Forgive your parents for their flaws. Forgiveness helps you heal. Now back to God.
For me there was only one way to begin to solve my God connection issue. That is to love Jesus and let Him transform me. But how? It started with my left brain and the need for evidence. The right brain feeling side came later.
I used to think I was just like Thomas. I needed to see the evidence of Jesus resurrection to believe. How could God provide evidence for an apostle but not me?
But God did not forget people like me.
My turning point was the Shroud of Turin. The image God created at the very moment of Jesus resurrection; He imprinted Jesus’ face upon His burial Shroud. He preserved it for all to see, so that all would know that God had entered the world with a message for all humanity. Come to me. I am love. I died for you. You can have eternity with Me.
His face helped me to know God intimately. It helped me love Him.
That wonderful image was the key point in my life. It became a fixture in my brain. I could now always see Jesus. I see God!!!
Jesus was a myth to me that I wanted to believe in. I searched for decades but could not find the evidence I needed until I found a book on the Shroud. That was my encounter with His face. That book’s cover with Jesus’ face on it hit me like no other book, ever. That book’s evidence changed my life. I now knew the resurrection had happened and that He died for me. The evidence, for those with eyes to see, is supernatural. His image pierced my heart. His face of peace in the presence of the worse pain and torture, He did for me. That is love that defies all understanding. He is my God and my Savior.
Since that moment He has continued to shape me through the Bible and other Christians. It has been over a decade long process for me. I have had supernatural experiences with Him that I wrote about in my book (also see my Ehrman article on this website). Those experiences made Him personal. He is my foundation stone in life. I will never be alone. No matter what happens He is inside of me. He will be with me. I will see Him face to face soon. I look forward to it.
I pray you receive Him as your Lord. He asks only that you love God and people. Repent of your sin and ask His forgiveness. Ask Him to be your Lord and Savior. Then find a Church (our life journey will impact our Church choice – I believe that strong believers have been planted by the Lord in Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Churches) and get baptized if you have not been, to show the world that He is your Lord. Always carry Him at your center. Men can let you down. He never will. It must be a personal relationship with Him that becomes your transformational center in life.
I have an issue with the authority of men. All are sinful. So, I submit to the leadership of pastor or priest to the extent of their leadership of the local church as long as he is following God. But I allow no man to get in between my spirit and God. Only God has direct authority over my spirit which I willingly give. For more on this see my article on whether God was calling me back to the Catholic Church. It gets back to trust.
That is the key to finding your way to overcome life’s obstacles. Jesus. Close your eyes and withdraw into your mind and let Jesus comfort you. Pray. It is His will for you to partner with Him through prayer. Let His peace come upon you. He will transform your heart.
When my wife passed away it opened my childhood pain. Lots of pain. How to heal? Too much to share except prayer became the key. I now believed in God and went deeply into prayer. Bearing your soul type prayer. Making Him now my partner. Sharing all my feelings and life with Him. Now I spend hours every day alone with Him. Whatever is on my heart sharing with Him. Worshipping Him. Loving Him. Feeling Him for the first time as I opened my heart to Him. He has finally become the center of my life through prayer of the most personal nature with all my innermost feelings wrapped together in it. He is now my partner for eternity. He is shaping me. It has been a long process for me.
God gave us a conscience to know right from wrong. It is one of the ways to know you can trust Him and that He is good.
He communicates to us, but we are often unaware because we misinterpret messages coming from Him as us. To discern feelings or thoughts that come into my head as coming from God is a skill that I was never taught. How do we hear from the Lord? It is the gentle nudging to our heart. As He calls and our heart yearns to embrace Him, we follow His lead. The thoughts of love for Him and others are His response. His love is never ending.
I am drawn to the Bible throughout the day. It is the Spirit. Constantly connecting me to Him. He draws me to Scripture. I am beginning to see the impact He is having on me and my mind. He transforms your thoughts and feelings. But it takes time. It is a process.
What we experience as a child is very difficult to overcome. But He has changed me. I am no longer the same person.
To acknowledge Jesus as Savior is the intellectual side of the brain. He is my Savior! I have no doubt. To acknowledge Him as Lord involves the emotional side. That is still in process from a life of emotional baggage. Holy Spirit knows. He is helping me to finish working through that.
Life may still be hard but now you have Him. We are spiritual creatures. When we are born again, we receive the Holy Spirit. He is now in us. He will transform our spirit. You will learn from Him how to feel at peace and grow closer to God.
Do not give up. He will not. Let Him through the door to your heart. He is knocking and wants you to welcome Him in.
Some additional comments:
- Wilder has coauthored another book Joyful Journey Listening to Emmanuel that I have found helpful in learning to hear and transform myself. It is a journey.
- Do you question the Shroud being the authentic image of Jesus at the moment of resurrection? I challenge you to read what I have on this website. I read all the top books and traveled to meet the world’s top scientist on the Shroud. I did my due diligence. It is absolutely supernatural. Those that deny it have their own worldview to look at.
- Do you want your child to believe in Christianity? You need to prepare them with evidence against evolution. Our public schools do not believe in creationism. Ninety-nine percent of college graduates are taught only about evolution. The Pew Form in a recent survey shows 99% of PHD’s hold to evolution because that is all they are ever taught. https://youtu.be/ZxYS02S8Bs4?is=CTnYv5AjVl6KzfgZ
- I had a very painful incident as a child. At the age of four I was attacked by another group of kids. I was a new kid and they threw stones and yelled at me. I was not physically hurt but I was deeply frightened emotionally. I kept it inside of me and further withdrew into myself because I had no connection with my father. This led to me isolating myself from other kids and not developing the emotional and social skills I needed to be happy. Healing took a lifetime. I did conventional talk therapy that did not help. What did was a type of Christian therapy involving bringing Jesus into the painful incident but with Him by my side. The Christian walking me through this was skilled in helping to bring me and Jesus together. One session healed me compared to years of band aids.
This video and website relate to the method of healing that helped me.
https://youtu.be/PopEl_hZai8?is=E2gYMP8w8x_E_pUQ
https://www.crosscounsel.com/how-to-heal
After you overcome the obstacles to believing you will know that the Bible is true and Jesus is the ultimate truth. You will believe that He is The Way, The Truth, and The Life. Satan has sown seeds of deception throughout our world. Deliberate false information. You will believe in Jesus and that He is the ultimate source of truth and reject what is at odds with Him because He is the only Way to peace.