Help My Unbelief

This past Friday, I sat in a beach chair watching my kids pluck hermit crabs from the wet sand when I received a call from my sister. She and her boyfriend were caring for our cat while we were away and had discovered that our air conditioner was not cooling. The temperature inside our house had climbed to a toasty 86 degrees.

“The world is burning, and our technology can’t keep up with the demands we are placing on it,” she said.

It was an offhand comment, but it struck a chord. Maybe it was because we had recently watched Arco, an animated film depicting a near-future Earth where increasingly catastrophic fires and storms have forced people to seek shelter beneath geodesic domes. The film was unsettling because its world did not feel all that far from our own.

Fear about the fate of our planet is a surefire (no pun intended) way to send me spiraling into doubt and despair. The problem feels impossibly large, yet it cannot be ignored or separated from the future my children will inherit. Perhaps you carry similarly overwhelming fears. Maybe yours are not global but deeply personal. Whatever their shape, hope can feel absurd when we reckon honestly with the realities of life.

Then again, hope has often sounded absurd.

In Genesis 17-18, God promises that Sarah will bear a child despite Abraham and Sarah’s advanced age. Abraham falls facedown laughing. Later, Sarah laughs to herself and then denies it out of fear. Whatever hope they once carried, this was a possibility they had long since laid to rest. I imagine their laughter was barbed. It must have hurt even to consider the promise.

Yet God does not abandon them because their faith contains disbelief. Their doubtful laughter is preserved in the child’s very name, Isaac, meaning “he laughs.” What first expressed the seeming impossibility of the promise becomes part of the testimony to God’s faithfulness.

In 2023, a friend who is also a pastor shared a song with me called “Help Me Believe.” I told her I happened to be writing a similar song whose chorus adapted the desperate father’s prayer in Mark 9:24: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” At the time, I was new to writing songs of faith for the church, and I admitted that I was unsure whether expressing doubt was appropriate for a worship leader.

She told me that as someone struggling with doubt, the song had given her immeasurable comfort.

I knew she was right. Hearing someone give voice to the fears I keep hidden has often had the same effect on me. I am only beginning to understand that honest worship does not weaken faith. Sometimes it helps us remain connected to God when certainty is unavailable.

Andy Squyres has become one of the writers who helps me bring my doubts into worship rather than leaving them outside its doors. Songs like “Jeff Buckley” and “Sing Your Glory” resist hollow reassurance and easy explanations. They remain in the mess of waiting, unanswered questions, God’s apparent silence, and creation’s groaning. Yet Squyres still sings, “I sing glory with no answers to the question.”

I do not believe faith requires us to settle every question before approaching God. In some seasons, faith may simply mean bringing our fear, our incredulity, and our barbed laughter into the presence of the Holy One. It may even look like singing worship songs through gritted teeth, angry with God and unsure whether we believe the words. God can handle it. We can acknowledge that the world is burning without surrendering to despair. We can resist easy answers, engage the suffering before us, and continue to love as Christ taught us.

Abraham and Sarah’s laughter was not edited out of their story. It became part of the story that they would tell every time they said Isaac’s name. May God do the same with our belief and unbelief, our lament and praise, our despair and our seemingly absurd hope. And when no resolution comes, may we still have the courage to keep showing up, keep loving, and keep singing glory.