May 6, 2025 • 20 mins
It wasn’t one big event that caused her to doubt her faith, it was more like a million paper cuts.
Niki Hardy, author of God, Can We Chat? knows what it’s like to look for answers and certainty to save your faith, but the truth is, certainty is a fickle friend. God and faith are a mystery after all.
Looking at her today: missionary from the UK, Christian author, and international speaker - you’d never guess that she would wrestle with doubt. But when Niki lost her mom to cancer, then her sister, and was diagnosed with cancer herself she feared she might lose her faith altogether.
Yes, our questions hold power but not to destroy or weaken our faith, but strengthen it - one honest chat at a time.
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Episode Transcript
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S1 (00:03):
It's the Perry and Shaunna podcast on the real life
journey with you, reminding you that you are ABBA's beloved
child and that Jesus has called you into his massive
mission to heal the world.
S2 (00:17):
If you've got questions, if you wonder if God is good,
or maybe even sometimes if he's real, you're not alone, Nicki.
From where I'm standing, it looks like you've got your
faith all figured out. You're a missionary from the UK
to the US. Came to plant a church. You travel,
you speak internationally about faith and about God. You've literally
(00:39):
written books about God's faithfulness. What do you know about
doubts and doubting God?
S3 (00:45):
Unfortunately, more than I'd like to, but it's become quite
a big part of my story. In the last couple
of years I lost my mum to cancer, I lost
my sister to cancer, and then just six weeks after
losing my sister Jo when she was just 44, I
was diagnosed and that sent me down this path of
(01:08):
questioning God, but always knowing his faithfulness within that. But
then fast forward another ten years and we get to
the pandemic. We get to Covid when the world shuts
down and the world seems to almost start disintegrating, with
social and racial and political and religious unrest and all
(01:30):
that unprecedented suffering that went with it. We'd also been
through a number of very difficult and painful things as
a family again. And then my readers were writing to
me about their stories, and I just got to this
point where I felt disillusioned, disappointed, confused. I had questions,
(01:53):
and I remember the moment when I got back from
a walk with our lovely but rather silly goldendoodle, Charlie,
who's at my feet right now? Oh, sweet. I felt
so lost. I mean, I knew where I was geographically.
I'd walked that path many, many times. But as I
got home and my husband al was sitting on the
(02:14):
sofa and he had amazing Grace playing, and the words
that we are all so familiar with. I once was lost,
but now I'm found was blind, but now I see.
They kind of followed me upstairs as I went to
take a shower and I just thought, you know, Lord,
those words don't hold true for me anymore. The opposite
(02:36):
is now true. Oh, wow. I once was found, but
now I'm lost. And I felt like I had come
to the crossroads of doubt and faith.
S2 (02:47):
What? What did your questions look like? Nikki, we are
talking with Nikki Hardy. She's an author. She's a cancer survivor.
She's a trusted Bible teacher. She offers practical steps to
embrace our doubts, potential to actually build our faith and
strengthen our relationship with God through the questioning. And she
has got a new book out. It's called God. Can
(03:07):
We Chat? We've got the quick link for you at
Moody Radio. So what were the questions that you were
asking Nikki? Were they just like, what the heck, Lord,
what are you doing? Or were they about his his nature,
his character? What what were they?
S3 (03:26):
They were so wide ranging. They were everything from. I
thought you were good. This doesn't feel good. Where are you?
I can't sense you or feel you or hear you to, um.
Why is your church behaving like this? You called us
to be united and love one another and love others.
(03:48):
And I don't see that in your people. Um, why
did you answer her prayer? Not my prayer. I mean,
the range was so far reaching. And actually, in the book. God,
can we chat? I've got 15 to 20 questions at
the end. Questions that I ask. Questions that my readers
asked because they are so diverse, they think we all
(04:12):
can question God's goodness, God's providence, God's timing, God's mercy,
God's provision. And we have specific questions for our own lives.
And and I don't think there's a bad question. God
wants to hear them all.
S2 (04:32):
Can questioning God strengthen your relationship with him? When my
oldest was headed off to college, I just remember so
clearly driving in our suburban, in our suburban. My husband
was driving. I'm in the passenger seat, turning around and
looking at her and all of her belongings behind her
in the back of the suburban. And I'm telling you,
she looked like she was four. I'm like this. This
(04:53):
is not right. This is so wrong. And my heart
was not at ease. But it was time she was ready.
We get to campus and we're in the ministry building.
She was a ministry major, and each of the profs
were sharing with the parents who were leaving their children
for the first time as freshmen, incoming freshmen, that they
had just come off a retreat. And the Lord put
(05:13):
something specific on their heart to pray for this specific
group of kids, and each one at a time. They
shared what they had been praying for our kids, and
one prof stood up and she said, I'm praying that
your child has a crisis of faith while they're here.
And I was like, don't pray for my child then please,
like all the rest of y'all can keep praying. But
that one? No. Um, but her point was that this
(05:37):
would be a place. This campus was a place where
it was okay to wrestle with your questions and to
make it known that you had questions about following Jesus,
and that they were going to be surrounded by people
who who would be okay with that, but also help
them and point them to Jesus. So I'm curious, Nikki,
in your book, you know, God, can we chat? It's
(05:59):
all about being honest with God and growing closer to
him through our questions. How do the questions strengthen our faith?
S3 (06:06):
Well, we assume, don't we? And when you tell that story,
there's this kind of sharp intake of breath. It's like,
please don't pray for my child that they will have
a crisis of faith because we assume that our questions
are our faith's greatest weakness, that they're its Kryptonite and
is going to lead to our faith falling apart. But
it really is possible when we take our questions to
(06:28):
God and lean into him, that our questions become our
faith superpower, that they become our faith's greatest strength. But it.
Like your professor said, it's all about coming to Jesus
with those questions honestly, truthfully. And in order to do that,
(06:49):
we have to reimagine our questions and our doubts and
disillusionment as a force for good. Then we have to
re frame all the lies that tell us that we
shouldn't doubt that, or that we're the only one, or
that we have to have certainty in order to be sure,
(07:11):
to have faith, to be a good Christian, whatever it is.
And then when we've got rid of that, we're free
to come to Jesus. And in God can we chat?
I actually give people a guided prayer format to do
that because so often we're like, okay, well, I'll come
to you, Jesus, but what do I say? How do
I know what you're saying? What do I do? So
(07:32):
that's how when we take them to Jesus, our questions
become a force for good, a powerful force for good
in our faith.
S2 (07:40):
Curious, Nikki, what is the threat to not being honest
with God? Like, what's the opposite of that? If we
choose not to acknowledge our questions and bring them before
the Lord, where does that lead us?
S3 (07:56):
That's a great question, because I think so many of
us get to this point of questioning either in an instant,
like there's this one big horrific event that happens that
completely sideswipes us and our faith. And for others of us,
it's more of a slow dying where our faith begins
(08:17):
to slowly die by a thousand paper cuts. And in
those moments, we always have a choice. Are we going
to turn to him or away from him? And I
think what we tend to do in response, we either
fake it on our and try and, you know, do
it ourselves. We force it and try and do it
ourselves or we fade away, and we just hope that
(08:38):
nobody will notice if we just kind of slide out
the side door of our faith. But when we turn
away from God, you know, I found in my own
life that I can become bitter and angry and those
walls can go up between myself and God. And that's
never a good thing, because our faith for most people
who question the reason we're questioning is because our relationship
(09:02):
with God is precious. We care. So if people are
doubting today, it's a sign that you care and that
you're that you love God and you don't want your
relationship with him to disintegrate.
S2 (09:18):
I'm pretty even keel. You know, there are people who
are really explosive, and I'm just kind of a steady eddy.
And so it really freaks people out when I blow up.
But it's usually the result of like, a million small
things that I tolerated. And it's this slow boil and
then boom, bomb explodes. Not a good look. But in
(09:39):
your book, Nikki, you mentioned that you felt like your
faith was dying from a thousand paper cuts. Can you
tell us a little bit more about that?
S3 (09:50):
Yeah, for some people, their faith is rocked in one big,
momentous event. Maybe the loss of a child or something
else that makes them question everything that they have held. True.
But for me, like I said, it was just one
small thing after another, after another, and it was the
(10:12):
relentlessness of the hard things, the relentlessness of the things
that I was seeing and just completely not comprehending either
in the people of God and the church wide worldwide.
It was even reading the Bible. Suddenly, I was reading
God's Word in these stories that I'd always been able to, um,
(10:35):
to process, just knowing that, well, God was in it
or God had sanctioned it. And now these times in
the Bible that just seemed so awful that if we
put them in today's headlines, we would be outraged by them.
You know, King orders murder of all two year olds.
We'd be like, what? But I'd always been able to
(10:57):
read it and say, well, you know, God was in it,
so it must have been okay. So there was just
one thing after another, after another after another. And slowly
my faith began to die, to fade out, to. I
was getting to this place, like I said, where I
felt more lost than found.
S2 (11:18):
I think a lot of times the questions are at
least for me, Nikki. The questions are initially about what
I'm experiencing, so very specific. But when they kind of
build up like that, it transitions to more of a
the questions being about maybe God's character. Did you were
(11:39):
you questioning like his character or, or the reality of him?
S3 (11:44):
I was it was this strange dynamic of knowing that
I know that he's good, but at the same time saying, God,
are you sure you're good? Because this doesn't look good.
Your ways don't seem kind or, um, even pleasant. You
know what's going on here? And and as I talk
(12:07):
about in the guided prayer format, where I in, in God,
can we chat where I help people talk to God?
You know, we go through this process, if you like,
of naming the event that happened. It's the acronym for
that prayer format is chat. And the first one is
consider the facts. And it's the facts of what happened.
(12:27):
You know, um, that maybe someone lost a child or
is struggling to get pregnant, and their friend who also
was struggling to get pregnant, is now pregnant and expecting.
So those are the facts that, you know, you don't
seem to have answered my prayer, God. But the then
we have to honor the story we're telling ourselves. And
(12:48):
this is really where I think the golden nugget of
what we're really questioning God about, what we're really concerned about,
and where God really wants to speak to us and
nurture us and love us, because there's often a story
behind the event that's, well, I'm insignificant. I'm unlovable. I'm
(13:09):
not spiritual enough. He can't see me or doesn't want
to see me. And so that's the real question. So
I was asking all these big theological questions. I was
asking about his provenance and his goodness. But actually the
golden nugget underneath was God. Do you see me.
S2 (13:28):
When it when it comes down to it? Is it
just does it really come down to the relationship? I mean,
this is not this is not about religion. This is
about relationship. And so all of the I don't know,
I kind of feel like all the questions are all
periphery until you get to it being about me and you,
(13:49):
me and God.
S3 (13:51):
Yes, exactly. And that's why I kind of used this
collective noun that I created God, Faith, church. It's kind
of all. And my, my questions Revolved around God, faith,
church like who he was is his character, faith, which
include religion and all the the trappings, if you like,
and and the Bible and then church and his people.
(14:14):
But actually, when it came down to it, it was
about me and him. So that's why the chat conversation
guide is about, okay, God, let's pull up, um, your
celestial sofa. Let's have a cup of tea and let's chat,
because I really want to know what you think about me. What?
(14:35):
How you would. What you want to tell me about yourself?
What am I missing? What do I need to know
or understand or believe? How do you want me to
to move into this question without sliding out the side door?
S2 (14:52):
Some of your questions are not going to get answered.
There are a lot of pieces to the pie in
our lives, and in one of the big pieces of
the pie for me, I am facing uncertainty right now,
and I can't tell you how much I want to
know what I don't know. And there's literally no call
I can make or conversation I can have or database
(15:13):
I can crack open. That's going to give me the
information that I want to know right now. And it's rough.
It's really hard if I'm honest and I'm it's revealed
something about my relationship with the Lord because I, I
feel recently like God is saying, are you seeking certainty
more than you're seeking me? Do you want the answers
to your questions more than you want me? Because I
(15:35):
know your questions aren't being answered, but I'm right here. So, Nikki,
what do we do when the questions are unanswerable? Where
do we. Where do we go with that?
S3 (15:47):
That's such a great question, because so often when something
tragic happens or something so confusing, we just can't wrap
our head around it, or we're just in a time
of waiting. We long for certainty. I know that more
than anyone. And you know, I'm a kind of scientist
at heart. And so my thinking is very black and white.
(16:10):
It's very easy to go. Well, the more questions I ask,
the more investigating and research I do, the I will
eventually find an answer. But with things of God, there's
so many times when we just won't know the answer.
I don't know why. My mom died in her early
60s and my sister died in her early 40s. I
(16:32):
don't know why I survived. We won't ever know that.
And this is one of those paradoxes of our relationship
with God. On the one hand, he is wonderfully knowable.
We can talk to him. We can feel his presence.
We can get to know Him in His Word and
through so many different things. But at the same time,
(16:54):
he's annoyingly unknowable. We are not. We are not God. Yeah,
but this is one of the paradoxes that we, I
think we struggle with the most. You know, we kind
of find with the paradox of that, like the Trinity,
we kind of get it, but we kind of don't,
and we can live in that mystery. But when it
comes to these unanswerable questions, we just don't like it.
(17:20):
And like you were saying, it can if we turn
away from God, if we just wrestle for that certainty
and ignore everything else, it can become a form of idolatry.
But God says, come to me, all you who are
weary and heavy laden, and I don't know about you
in this area of uncertainty in your life. It must
(17:43):
be exhausting. And he says, come to me. Walk with me.
Talk with me. That's what you know. The message paraphrase says,
learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
S2 (17:52):
It's so beautiful. Here's what I find myself doing a lot.
We're talking with Nikki Hardie right now, by the way.
She is the author of God Can We Chat? And
it's a daringly honest guide to growing closer with God.
One doubt at a time. Taking your doubts. Taking your
questions to God Himself and opening up conversation. And one
of the things that I find as I'm walking through
(18:13):
this season is you had said, it takes a lot
of energy. Nikki, my mental capacity, like every down moment
that comes in, the uncertainty comes in and it takes
up all the space. It's very bossy and I it's
actually revealed other sin in my life because it reveals
when that bossy thought comes to mind. And I don't
(18:35):
have answers that I'm longing for. Where do I go
for comfort? Where do I want my mind to go?
And I'm tempted to online shop or, you know, and
it's like, oh, okay. Well, clearly I think a new
pair of shoes will solve everything. It's like, that's ridiculous.
S3 (18:50):
But we're after that, that love, that assurance. And dopamine
gives us that. The online shopping, the scrolling, whatever is
your dopamine fix. And so for me, what I try
and do. I'm not very good at it, but I'm
getting better at it is go to what I do
know about God for my dopamine fix. Where have I
(19:12):
seen him work and be present in my life in
the past? And look at that and be grateful for that,
and use that as the hook to to gratitude, to praise.
Because we know that that creates dopamine. We know that
makes us feel better, that you don't need to see
things differently to be grateful. Rather, be grateful to see
(19:35):
things differently. And so can we go to that, to
what we do know about God.
S1 (19:43):
Thanks for letting Barry and Shawna walk the real life
journey with you. The content from the Perry and Shawna
podcast comes from their live show Barry and Shawna Mornings
on 89.3 Moody Radio, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Reach out to
us by texting 809 68 8930 and please subscribe.
It's the Perry and Shaunna podcast on the real life
journey with you, reminding you that you are ABBA's beloved
child and that Jesus has called you into his massive
mission to heal the world.
S2 (00:17):
If you've got questions, if you wonder if God is good,
or maybe even sometimes if he's real, you're not alone, Nicki.
From where I'm standing, it looks like you've got your
faith all figured out. You're a missionary from the UK
to the US. Came to plant a church. You travel,
you speak internationally about faith and about God. You've literally
(00:39):
written books about God's faithfulness. What do you know about
doubts and doubting God?
S3 (00:45):
Unfortunately, more than I'd like to, but it's become quite
a big part of my story. In the last couple
of years I lost my mum to cancer, I lost
my sister to cancer, and then just six weeks after
losing my sister Jo when she was just 44, I
was diagnosed and that sent me down this path of
(01:08):
questioning God, but always knowing his faithfulness within that. But
then fast forward another ten years and we get to
the pandemic. We get to Covid when the world shuts
down and the world seems to almost start disintegrating, with
social and racial and political and religious unrest and all
(01:30):
that unprecedented suffering that went with it. We'd also been
through a number of very difficult and painful things as
a family again. And then my readers were writing to
me about their stories, and I just got to this
point where I felt disillusioned, disappointed, confused. I had questions,
(01:53):
and I remember the moment when I got back from
a walk with our lovely but rather silly goldendoodle, Charlie,
who's at my feet right now? Oh, sweet. I felt
so lost. I mean, I knew where I was geographically.
I'd walked that path many, many times. But as I
got home and my husband al was sitting on the
(02:14):
sofa and he had amazing Grace playing, and the words
that we are all so familiar with. I once was lost,
but now I'm found was blind, but now I see.
They kind of followed me upstairs as I went to
take a shower and I just thought, you know, Lord,
those words don't hold true for me anymore. The opposite
(02:36):
is now true. Oh, wow. I once was found, but
now I'm lost. And I felt like I had come
to the crossroads of doubt and faith.
S2 (02:47):
What? What did your questions look like? Nikki, we are
talking with Nikki Hardy. She's an author. She's a cancer survivor.
She's a trusted Bible teacher. She offers practical steps to
embrace our doubts, potential to actually build our faith and
strengthen our relationship with God through the questioning. And she
has got a new book out. It's called God. Can
(03:07):
We Chat? We've got the quick link for you at
Moody Radio. So what were the questions that you were
asking Nikki? Were they just like, what the heck, Lord,
what are you doing? Or were they about his his nature,
his character? What what were they?
S3 (03:26):
They were so wide ranging. They were everything from. I
thought you were good. This doesn't feel good. Where are you?
I can't sense you or feel you or hear you to, um.
Why is your church behaving like this? You called us
to be united and love one another and love others.
(03:48):
And I don't see that in your people. Um, why
did you answer her prayer? Not my prayer. I mean,
the range was so far reaching. And actually, in the book. God,
can we chat? I've got 15 to 20 questions at
the end. Questions that I ask. Questions that my readers
asked because they are so diverse, they think we all
(04:12):
can question God's goodness, God's providence, God's timing, God's mercy,
God's provision. And we have specific questions for our own lives.
And and I don't think there's a bad question. God
wants to hear them all.
S2 (04:32):
Can questioning God strengthen your relationship with him? When my
oldest was headed off to college, I just remember so
clearly driving in our suburban, in our suburban. My husband
was driving. I'm in the passenger seat, turning around and
looking at her and all of her belongings behind her
in the back of the suburban. And I'm telling you,
she looked like she was four. I'm like this. This
(04:53):
is not right. This is so wrong. And my heart
was not at ease. But it was time she was ready.
We get to campus and we're in the ministry building.
She was a ministry major, and each of the profs
were sharing with the parents who were leaving their children
for the first time as freshmen, incoming freshmen, that they
had just come off a retreat. And the Lord put
(05:13):
something specific on their heart to pray for this specific
group of kids, and each one at a time. They
shared what they had been praying for our kids, and
one prof stood up and she said, I'm praying that
your child has a crisis of faith while they're here.
And I was like, don't pray for my child then please,
like all the rest of y'all can keep praying. But
that one? No. Um, but her point was that this
(05:37):
would be a place. This campus was a place where
it was okay to wrestle with your questions and to
make it known that you had questions about following Jesus,
and that they were going to be surrounded by people
who who would be okay with that, but also help
them and point them to Jesus. So I'm curious, Nikki,
in your book, you know, God, can we chat? It's
(05:59):
all about being honest with God and growing closer to
him through our questions. How do the questions strengthen our faith?
S3 (06:06):
Well, we assume, don't we? And when you tell that story,
there's this kind of sharp intake of breath. It's like,
please don't pray for my child that they will have
a crisis of faith because we assume that our questions
are our faith's greatest weakness, that they're its Kryptonite and
is going to lead to our faith falling apart. But
it really is possible when we take our questions to
(06:28):
God and lean into him, that our questions become our
faith superpower, that they become our faith's greatest strength. But it.
Like your professor said, it's all about coming to Jesus
with those questions honestly, truthfully. And in order to do that,
(06:49):
we have to reimagine our questions and our doubts and
disillusionment as a force for good. Then we have to
re frame all the lies that tell us that we
shouldn't doubt that, or that we're the only one, or
that we have to have certainty in order to be sure,
(07:11):
to have faith, to be a good Christian, whatever it is.
And then when we've got rid of that, we're free
to come to Jesus. And in God can we chat?
I actually give people a guided prayer format to do
that because so often we're like, okay, well, I'll come
to you, Jesus, but what do I say? How do
I know what you're saying? What do I do? So
(07:32):
that's how when we take them to Jesus, our questions
become a force for good, a powerful force for good
in our faith.
S2 (07:40):
Curious, Nikki, what is the threat to not being honest
with God? Like, what's the opposite of that? If we
choose not to acknowledge our questions and bring them before
the Lord, where does that lead us?
S3 (07:56):
That's a great question, because I think so many of
us get to this point of questioning either in an instant,
like there's this one big horrific event that happens that
completely sideswipes us and our faith. And for others of us,
it's more of a slow dying where our faith begins
(08:17):
to slowly die by a thousand paper cuts. And in
those moments, we always have a choice. Are we going
to turn to him or away from him? And I
think what we tend to do in response, we either
fake it on our and try and, you know, do
it ourselves. We force it and try and do it
ourselves or we fade away, and we just hope that
(08:38):
nobody will notice if we just kind of slide out
the side door of our faith. But when we turn
away from God, you know, I found in my own
life that I can become bitter and angry and those
walls can go up between myself and God. And that's
never a good thing, because our faith for most people
who question the reason we're questioning is because our relationship
(09:02):
with God is precious. We care. So if people are
doubting today, it's a sign that you care and that
you're that you love God and you don't want your
relationship with him to disintegrate.
S2 (09:18):
I'm pretty even keel. You know, there are people who
are really explosive, and I'm just kind of a steady eddy.
And so it really freaks people out when I blow up.
But it's usually the result of like, a million small
things that I tolerated. And it's this slow boil and
then boom, bomb explodes. Not a good look. But in
(09:39):
your book, Nikki, you mentioned that you felt like your
faith was dying from a thousand paper cuts. Can you
tell us a little bit more about that?
S3 (09:50):
Yeah, for some people, their faith is rocked in one big,
momentous event. Maybe the loss of a child or something
else that makes them question everything that they have held. True.
But for me, like I said, it was just one
small thing after another, after another, and it was the
(10:12):
relentlessness of the hard things, the relentlessness of the things
that I was seeing and just completely not comprehending either
in the people of God and the church wide worldwide.
It was even reading the Bible. Suddenly, I was reading
God's Word in these stories that I'd always been able to, um,
(10:35):
to process, just knowing that, well, God was in it
or God had sanctioned it. And now these times in
the Bible that just seemed so awful that if we
put them in today's headlines, we would be outraged by them.
You know, King orders murder of all two year olds.
We'd be like, what? But I'd always been able to
(10:57):
read it and say, well, you know, God was in it,
so it must have been okay. So there was just
one thing after another, after another after another. And slowly
my faith began to die, to fade out, to. I
was getting to this place, like I said, where I
felt more lost than found.
S2 (11:18):
I think a lot of times the questions are at
least for me, Nikki. The questions are initially about what
I'm experiencing, so very specific. But when they kind of
build up like that, it transitions to more of a
the questions being about maybe God's character. Did you were
(11:39):
you questioning like his character or, or the reality of him?
S3 (11:44):
I was it was this strange dynamic of knowing that
I know that he's good, but at the same time saying, God,
are you sure you're good? Because this doesn't look good.
Your ways don't seem kind or, um, even pleasant. You
know what's going on here? And and as I talk
(12:07):
about in the guided prayer format, where I in, in God,
can we chat where I help people talk to God?
You know, we go through this process, if you like,
of naming the event that happened. It's the acronym for
that prayer format is chat. And the first one is
consider the facts. And it's the facts of what happened.
(12:27):
You know, um, that maybe someone lost a child or
is struggling to get pregnant, and their friend who also
was struggling to get pregnant, is now pregnant and expecting.
So those are the facts that, you know, you don't
seem to have answered my prayer, God. But the then
we have to honor the story we're telling ourselves. And
(12:48):
this is really where I think the golden nugget of
what we're really questioning God about, what we're really concerned about,
and where God really wants to speak to us and
nurture us and love us, because there's often a story
behind the event that's, well, I'm insignificant. I'm unlovable. I'm
(13:09):
not spiritual enough. He can't see me or doesn't want
to see me. And so that's the real question. So
I was asking all these big theological questions. I was
asking about his provenance and his goodness. But actually the
golden nugget underneath was God. Do you see me.
S2 (13:28):
When it when it comes down to it? Is it
just does it really come down to the relationship? I mean,
this is not this is not about religion. This is
about relationship. And so all of the I don't know,
I kind of feel like all the questions are all
periphery until you get to it being about me and you,
(13:49):
me and God.
S3 (13:51):
Yes, exactly. And that's why I kind of used this
collective noun that I created God, Faith, church. It's kind
of all. And my, my questions Revolved around God, faith,
church like who he was is his character, faith, which
include religion and all the the trappings, if you like,
and and the Bible and then church and his people.
(14:14):
But actually, when it came down to it, it was
about me and him. So that's why the chat conversation
guide is about, okay, God, let's pull up, um, your
celestial sofa. Let's have a cup of tea and let's chat,
because I really want to know what you think about me. What?
(14:35):
How you would. What you want to tell me about yourself?
What am I missing? What do I need to know
or understand or believe? How do you want me to
to move into this question without sliding out the side door?
S2 (14:52):
Some of your questions are not going to get answered.
There are a lot of pieces to the pie in
our lives, and in one of the big pieces of
the pie for me, I am facing uncertainty right now,
and I can't tell you how much I want to
know what I don't know. And there's literally no call
I can make or conversation I can have or database
(15:13):
I can crack open. That's going to give me the
information that I want to know right now. And it's rough.
It's really hard if I'm honest and I'm it's revealed
something about my relationship with the Lord because I, I
feel recently like God is saying, are you seeking certainty
more than you're seeking me? Do you want the answers
to your questions more than you want me? Because I
(15:35):
know your questions aren't being answered, but I'm right here. So, Nikki,
what do we do when the questions are unanswerable? Where
do we. Where do we go with that?
S3 (15:47):
That's such a great question, because so often when something
tragic happens or something so confusing, we just can't wrap
our head around it, or we're just in a time
of waiting. We long for certainty. I know that more
than anyone. And you know, I'm a kind of scientist
at heart. And so my thinking is very black and white.
(16:10):
It's very easy to go. Well, the more questions I ask,
the more investigating and research I do, the I will
eventually find an answer. But with things of God, there's
so many times when we just won't know the answer.
I don't know why. My mom died in her early
60s and my sister died in her early 40s. I
(16:32):
don't know why I survived. We won't ever know that.
And this is one of those paradoxes of our relationship
with God. On the one hand, he is wonderfully knowable.
We can talk to him. We can feel his presence.
We can get to know Him in His Word and
through so many different things. But at the same time,
(16:54):
he's annoyingly unknowable. We are not. We are not God. Yeah,
but this is one of the paradoxes that we, I
think we struggle with the most. You know, we kind
of find with the paradox of that, like the Trinity,
we kind of get it, but we kind of don't,
and we can live in that mystery. But when it
comes to these unanswerable questions, we just don't like it.
(17:20):
And like you were saying, it can if we turn
away from God, if we just wrestle for that certainty
and ignore everything else, it can become a form of idolatry.
But God says, come to me, all you who are
weary and heavy laden, and I don't know about you
in this area of uncertainty in your life. It must
(17:43):
be exhausting. And he says, come to me. Walk with me.
Talk with me. That's what you know. The message paraphrase says,
learn the unforced rhythms of grace.
S2 (17:52):
It's so beautiful. Here's what I find myself doing a lot.
We're talking with Nikki Hardie right now, by the way.
She is the author of God Can We Chat? And
it's a daringly honest guide to growing closer with God.
One doubt at a time. Taking your doubts. Taking your
questions to God Himself and opening up conversation. And one
of the things that I find as I'm walking through
(18:13):
this season is you had said, it takes a lot
of energy. Nikki, my mental capacity, like every down moment
that comes in, the uncertainty comes in and it takes
up all the space. It's very bossy and I it's
actually revealed other sin in my life because it reveals
when that bossy thought comes to mind. And I don't
(18:35):
have answers that I'm longing for. Where do I go
for comfort? Where do I want my mind to go?
And I'm tempted to online shop or, you know, and
it's like, oh, okay. Well, clearly I think a new
pair of shoes will solve everything. It's like, that's ridiculous.
S3 (18:50):
But we're after that, that love, that assurance. And dopamine
gives us that. The online shopping, the scrolling, whatever is
your dopamine fix. And so for me, what I try
and do. I'm not very good at it, but I'm
getting better at it is go to what I do
know about God for my dopamine fix. Where have I
(19:12):
seen him work and be present in my life in
the past? And look at that and be grateful for that,
and use that as the hook to to gratitude, to praise.
Because we know that that creates dopamine. We know that
makes us feel better, that you don't need to see
things differently to be grateful. Rather, be grateful to see
(19:35):
things differently. And so can we go to that, to
what we do know about God.
S1 (19:43):
Thanks for letting Barry and Shawna walk the real life
journey with you. The content from the Perry and Shawna
podcast comes from their live show Barry and Shawna Mornings
on 89.3 Moody Radio, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Reach out to
us by texting 809 68 8930 and please subscribe.
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