One of the main reasons young people leave the church is because doubt is demonized and questions are discouraged. Instead of filling a sincere intellectual hole with Holy cement the church puts hazard tape around it and warns young people to not get too close. Do we think that God is that fragile? Are we afraid that God will disappear in a puff of logic? If we truly worship the one true God, the creator of the universe, then I don’t think He would be phased by a few mortal questions.

I would argue that doubt, rather than knocking us off the beaten track, actually blazes the trail of faith.

I don’t want to frighten those of you who are mathematically challenged, but I think the concept of the line of best fit serves as an important metaphor for our faith journey. The line of best fit is defined as; a line through a scatter plot of data points that best expresses the relationship between those points. Our lives are really just a series of data points acquired through experience and inquiry. The more points we have on our life graph the better our life line will approximate reality.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

Once we enter all the data and plot the trajectory of our lives we will see that it forms a faith vector. Doubt, rather than pointing us in the wrong direction, actually makes our crooked paths straight, and the assurance that we receive from the direction of our life line allows us to be even more confident about our journey into the afterlife. We can no longer dismiss the hard questions of our young people because when we do we deprive them of the very data they need to construct a line of best fit, a faith vector that points to the glorious things not yet seen.