The Boundary Lines have Fallen

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Searching the Michigan Dunes

Lord, you alone are my portion and my cup;
you make my lot secure.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.
I will praise the Lord, who counsels me;
even at night my heart instructs me.
I keep my eyes always on the Lord.
With him at my right hand, I will not be shaken.

I’ll be reading this as the Old Testament scripture this morning on what’s been called, “Doubting Thomas Sunday.” It’s a Psalm characterized by confidence, a Psalm that somehow seems an inappropriate text for the day. But when we consider that the Psalms are various—that one rings out despair akin to Jesus’ lament on the cross, (My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me) while the next is jubilant and devoid of doubt—we may have come closer to understanding Thomas’ declaration that he will need tangible, physical proof before he will believe in a risen Christ.

You see, Thomas wasn’t always a “doubter,” and didn’t remain a doubter either. In fact, he may have been the only honest disciple; the rest gave away their doubts by walking away, leaving them unexpressed verbally, announcing them with their feet. A character in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi philosophizes about it like this: “If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from the Cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ then surely we are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”

Doubting is inevitable. Why did God permit my beautiful daughter to die in a car accident? If He saw the car going out of control, did He decide to allow it to happen, or was He powerless to intervene? Is it possible He doesn’t exist, that the whole concept of a God who actively governs events in the universe is wishful thinking gone viral? Or is it possible that I’ve completely screwed up my understanding of God by picturing Him in the likeness of a man on a throne in an imaginary heaven?

Perhaps He was riding in the car with my daughter and died there as well.

How could such doubts not come to all of us at times, especially the difficult, discouraging times?

Creation has given us perception, reason and logic, the ability to hope, the power to courageously alter our circumstances for the better. And, yes, the capacity for confidence like the Psalmist expresses in the song we call Psalms 16. But without the gift of doubt, all others gain an inclination to pit themselves against each other, to create walls, for instance, lest they escape from us or some force from outside assail them.

Walled in, doubtless certainty is the spiritual equivalent of tyranny.

“The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places;
surely I have a delightful inheritance.”





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