Deepest Thanks, Deeper Apologies: Reconciling Deeply Held Faith with Honest Doubt

by Stephen Shortridge

Overview

This book is for those of us who have failed at being doubt-free but whose passion for God remains steadfast. It's for those who have been confused by the world -- and perhaps even by their own desires -- and still long to connect with a loving God who forgives and embraces us. It's for those who wonder at how our personal failures and uncertainties can make our faith mature -- and yet who can believe that somehow these wrestlings also make our need for God complete. Combining incredibly candid reflections and insights from the author with rich reminders for every man and woman's spiritual journey, Deepest Thanks, Deeper Apologies springs from a deep desire not to explain mystery, or to remove doubt, but to encourage mystery and raise doubt -- for all who dare to be honest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781617950216
Publisher:	Worthy Books
Publication date:	04/08/2025
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	170
File size:	5 MB

About the Author

S.C. Shortridge has been a professional artist for more than thirty years. In the 70s and 80s he had a successful career in acting which included film, TV and commercials. In 1989 he left Los Angeles and acting to pursue his love of art. He has since become a world-renowned painter. His brilliant creativity and profound spiritual insights are reflected in both his painting and his writing. Stephen and his wife, Cathy, live in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where they raised their family and own The Painter's Chair Fine Art Gallery.

Read an Excerpt

Deepest Thanks Deeper Apologies

Reconciling Deeply Held Faith with Honest Doubt

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By Stephen Shortridge

WORTHY PUBLISHING

Copyright © 2011 Stephen Shortridge
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61795-021-6

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CHAPTER 1

THE JOURNEY BEGINS: BLINDED BY MY GLORY

I was driving on a hot summer's day ... My only companions a loud, frustrated life, a whining, disappointed self-righteousness, and faith, riding silent in back. As I drove, the road turned to water. I drove for hours and hours, chasing a mirage, but the water always stayed just before me. I could see it, yet couldn't reach it. I still haven't. Not yet.

—S.C.S.

Most of us start our adult lives hopelessly selfish, as selfish as when we started our lives as children. But with the medications of social constraint, or our fear of judgment in fellowship, we seem to control it. Or is it just hiding?

In spite of all my efforts to outpace my selfishness, it always catches up to me. It won't die. I've tried to kill it and have asked God to kill it, but it remains. As long as I walk this road, it's the temptation that will accompany me, keeping pace with me as a constant companion. Occasionally I feel victorious in my fight against it, and it seems to leave—but only to wait for a better opportunity to attack me when I'm weak, with only imagined strength.

My selfishness is a default position. When I don't choose to follow God, that choice defaults to my selfishness. Here, in stage one, without God, loving myself for my sake is a most reasonable action. It's programmed into me. Some people live their whole lives in this default mode, blinded by their own glorious selfishness, unable to see the glory of God that surrounds them.

But if we decide to follow God, our selfishness creates consequences, most of them bad. I am beginning to see that if I let my selfishness have its way, it leads me to a lonely kingdom, which is no kingdom at all. Just a king—me. And so our journeys begin, everyone selfishly deceived, everyone hopelessly proud.

Are We There Yet?

It's this self-centered mind-set that blinds us to misunderstand and soaks us with frustration on our journey. Even as adults we continue asking, like children, "Are we there yet?" And we are not.

How we deal with that truth is how we face this life and how we try to make things work. Everyone just wants to be happy, right? We try many things—including many things that harm us and others—and all the while we're still on this road, traveling.

This journey we share has a mystery that is not always enchanting and too often confusing. The uncertainties make it difficult. Some believe the road leads to nowhere. For me, it is a road to heaven, a road that stretches before me as it stretches my faith with doubt and questions my patience.

I wrote the poem "Where the Road Turns to Water" during a stretch of patience-testing road when I was feeling particularly frustrated; the promises of God felt like mirages, and my frustration led me to betray my truest longings. Blessed with exhaustion and mercifully wounded by futility, I could go no further.

Where the Road Turns to Water

Where the road turns to water,
The sun meets the sea ...
Logic betrays, eyes deceive ...
Only Love will prevail, only Love truly sees.

My best havings are but my wantings—
I reach forth with longing—
To where the road turns to water,
And the sun meets the sea.

Oh, to see, to taste, to feel, but sensing ...
Mind and spirit outpaced—
The road blurs with water.
On knees knelt,
So drawn to remember ...a place only felt.

See the sun meet the sea?
My rainbow's end,
Love waits for me.
Only Love will prevail, only Love truly sees ...
Where the road turns to water.

Like a psalm, this poem was a plaintive plea for rescue. It was heard by a merciful God whose promises are true even if they are "not yet."

Where "the sun meets the sea" is where my Savior waits for me—not the mirage, but the reality. His love will prevail where the road turns to water.

What road are you on? Who's waiting for you where the road turns to water?

Authentic Contest

In painting, there must be a contest for the positions of mass and space. Everything is being challenged, pushed, and defined by the other. Where they meet, the apparent lines are energized by the contest. The vying, overlapping, and winning of their positions is unifying. Without this contest you have outlined objects, dismembered masses, and detached spaces.

In life, there is a contest for our souls. Everything I consider good or bad is being challenged, pushed, and defined by the other. The vying, overlapping, and winning of their positions is challenging and unifying. The honest struggle makes us authentic.

When I am not truthful about my struggles, my life is in-authentic. My life is dishonest. And in that life detached from reality, I build fortresses to defend my fantasies.

Anyone living in reality can see that I am not truthful. I am not just a bad witness; I am a fantasy witness. I am living amid fantasies that affect my faith by making God look like an escape from reality, instead of a way into it.

All along this road I travel, I see signs that seem to contradict each other. The distances and destinations are reversed. I'm surprised when I find the town of Foolishness is on the way to Wisdom, or that Pride is so close and Humility is so far away. This is paradox. It seems unlikely, if not impossible. But God makes it true.

Joys and Sorrows Share Tears

I find myself caught in the tension between what is and what could be while existing amid all the living out of the "not yet." In that tension, I struggle to make choices, and those choices have consequences that sometimes create contradictions.

I am sad to admit that, because of sin, I have never purely loved God or other people. I guess that would be both beautiful and sad, like seeing glimpses of heaven that somehow bring both bliss and torment, leaving me haunted by longing and full of regrets. Only by God's mercy have the redemption of those regrets and the fulfillment of those longings already begun.

It's here, under the same roof, that my joys of thanksgiving and sorrows of repentance share their tears and call me home. It's also here that I offer my deepest thanks to God and man for the beauty I see and experience. And I offer my deeper apologies for the times I have needed forgiveness.

CHAPTER 2

SELFISHLY DECEIVED AND HOPELESSLY PROUD

Who would have guessed? That in the knowing question of every three-year-old, "Are we there yet?" lies the question That haunts us all the days of our lives.

—S.C.S.

At the end of the movie Tombstone, as Doc Holliday is dying, he asks Wyatt Earp, "What did you want?"

Earp replies, "I just wanted a normal life."

Doc pauses then slowly answers, "There is no normal life, Wyatt. There's just life. Now get on with it."

There is no normal life. There is only normal sin, normal repentance, and holy redemption. Now get on with it. The only "normal" people are people we will never know. If we ever did really come to know them—they would stop being normal immediately.

When I think that others don't struggle in life, I'm just unaware. We all struggle on this road of life. There's no need to pretend.

Our trials and struggles are alike in that they are unpredictable. They are unalike in that each of us struggles against something different.

I should expect trials and be prepared for them. But predictably, when my sin creates a trial, I insist it's an accident. And once I am in a trial, I can be deceived, believing that all trials are evil; or despair, that trials cannot be turned to gold. When we choose sin and live our lives without God, why are we so shocked that trials turn into train wrecks? My efforts to deny or avoid life's struggles will only lead me to sin, because only sin promises me the world as I want it and not as it is.

Believe me, my sin is no stranger to me. He looks and acts like an old friend, always happy to see me, wondering where I've been.

But in this stage of the journey, when I love myself for my sake, I don't seem to believe in sin or its consequence. I can't quite believe that this old friend would lie to me with the hope of destroying me. While I'm proudly reveling in my own successes, that attitude deceives me to assume my struggle is behind me. Or perhaps I acknowledge that trials are possible, but I try to anticipate when they will appear. I face the future as if I control it—or that it's out of control. Both are deceptions, and not trusting God in either, I fear.

Our struggles are real, and they are not then or there, but here and now. Not so much with others, but in the midst of ourselves.

Learned Ignorance

This spiritual life we are trying to learn may be as much about unlearning as learning. We begin with learned knowledge, proud and filled with answers. But, hopefully, we end with "learned ignorance," as Nicholas of Cusa called it, finishing with humility and filled with awe. Are you full of awe or full of yourself?

What we often consider wisdom is only experience. Do we really become wise, or are the wise tired fools?

As we begin our journeys, we still have too much unspent energy for our "self-love." Later, though, when we are finally spent, we grow tired.

We thirst ... but not for God.

Not yet.

What if to know wisdom—I first need to know foolishness?

What if to find humility—I first need to know pride?

What if to find hope—I first need to know despair?

What if to find gratitude—I first need to know loss?

What if to find faith—I first need to know risk?

The Freedom of a Fool

What if to find wisdom—I first need to know foolishness?

Foolishness has been one of the ways I come to desire God's wisdom. It's not as if wisdom were lost; it's that I seem to do anything and go anywhere to avoid it. I think we keep foolishness in our lives because our sin calls it "freedom"—even though it is freedom from God. People imagine creative people are more passionate. Maybe they're just freer to have passions about God or something else.

My desire for wisdom was usually chosen by default, through defeat and, after the completed work of my foolishness, futility. The wisdom that can handle this kind of futility is the wisdom that has broken hope with anything but God himself. Because I love myself for my sake, that kind of wisdom is hard to find and comes at a great cost.

At this stage there are still so many choices and possibilities that I insist on trying. God may still be on my list of possibilities, but for now He's still near the bottom.

Much later I will come to realize that God's wisdom looks, sounds, smells, tastes, and feels a bit melancholy because it's linked to my sadness, the regret that His wisdom took so long to get and cost so much to gain. The cost was indeed great—to myself and to others, whether or not they know it.

Over the years, I have tried to gain knowledge about God and wisdom about myself, and in my quest I've been deceived by a godly hope: that knowledge and wisdom would result in obedience.

It does not. I still must choose to obey.

Futility can teach us wisdom, but only if it's wisdom that we want. King Solomon was thought to be the wisest man to ever live because as a young man he asked God for wisdom. But I was always confused about when he received it.

Was it the knowledge he was given about man and the universe that made him the wisest man? Or was it the later failure and desires of his own heart that made him the greatest fool? Or was it both?

What if God's gift of wisdom included a full knowledge of yourself? A knowing that revealed a rebellious heart in need of redemption? A knowing that revealed a complete understanding of foolishness and the complete knowing of your need as well?

In my personal experience, when I have gained wisdom, I have better understood it in terms of foolishness rather than theology.

Bouts of Arrogance and Near-fatal Pride

Humility is an experienced virtue. It usually comes from having survived bouts of arrogance and near-fatal pride. The truth is, someone who is greatly humble has been humbled greatly. Humility is not a badge of honor but a Purple Heart given to those wounded in battle who survived to tell their stories.

Pride comes before a fall, and a fall comes before a humbling. The higher the pride, the greater the fall. The greater the repentance, the greater the forgiveness. The greater the forgiveness, the greater the love. I have received much love.

A. W. Tozer reminds us that there are "two classes of Christians: the proud who imagine they are humble and the humble who are afraid they are proud. There should be another class: the self-forgetful who leave the whole thing in the hands of Christ and refuse to waste any time trying to make themselves good. They will reach the goal far ahead of the rest."

When I imagine what the self-forgetful class might look like, I imagine it as preschoolers finger-painting with God, hands touching and paint on their faces, laughing.

Humility is an expression of childlike gratitude; pride, an expression of adult foolishness. Being an artist is a childlike endeavor that requires wonder to be successful. I watch grown-ups and feel especially grateful to God that I have not completely forfeited the playful wisdom of a child.

There have been times in my life when I was very adult. My life was busy; I was very important but rarely satisfied. I looked everywhere for answers, but I had no idea what I was looking for. These are the "adult" traits of pride.

Proudly Humble

When I didn't have the god I wanted, I made one. Of course, he was my God; everyone else made their own. In church one Sunday I had a vision of sorts. God showed me people worshiping different gods while He stood off to one side, very sad, as He watched these people worshiping their gods of health, of prosperity, spiritual gifts, and more. The childlike faith that pleases a holy God is not sophisticated enough for such mature deceptions.

Oh, but that deceptive pride is seductive. It calls my selfishness Beloved—dearly Beloved. And when I least expect it, I'm beguiled. I'm nearly defenseless against its wooing because we've been intimate friends my entire life. At this stage, I don't yet realize that I am being betrayed, that it is not my friend but my foe. And then comes my pride's greatest trick of all: the blinding deception of convincing me that I'm humble.

Now I realize that those rare times when I did feel humble were only preludes to my repentance. (Self-righteousness is not limited to the religious—all that's required is small amounts of humility and adequate pride.)

When you love yourself for yourself and not because you are God's creation, you believe you're complete in yourself. You need no one else. You don't need to impress anyone; you impress yourself. And now, feeling self-satisfied, you compliment yourself with thoughtful praise, "I'm so proud of how humble you've become."

Imagine—

Trying to weave a tapestry taken off the loom.
Nothing stays true.
It becomes difficult, and then impossible, as it tangles and knots,
distorting the image,
making the original design unrecognizable.
Without the parameter of the loom, the work is lost to itself,
And with no hope of being what it was, it becomes something else.
In the end
It is no tapestry at all, just a large ball of tangled yarn.
Complex, with beautiful knots, and lots of pretty colors to look at ...
but useless as a tapestry.

Much of this life is woven off the loom.
Especially the beautiful knots of man's philosophies,
"I must be God," said as statement, politely.
And eventually, the pretty colors,
"I will be God," said as a challenge, defiantly.

The Word IsWho,NotWhat

My wife's grandmother was a godly woman who lived and died in the dirt-poor hills of West Virginia. She lived the Scriptures. One day my wife, Cath, asked her dad, "Did Grandma read her Bible every day?"

He paused and then, through tears, said, "Oh, honey ... she couldn't read."

You don't have to read to know the Word—but you can read the Word without knowing.

There are the misconceptions that knowledge is more important than experience and that experience is more important than truth. These misconceptions have settled into two camps of religion: one assumes knowledge creates a relationship with God; the other assumes experiences are evidence of that relationship.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Deepest Thanks Deeper Apologies by Stephen Shortridge. Copyright © 2011 Stephen Shortridge. Excerpted by permission of WORTHY PUBLISHING.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

A Note of Explanation ...,
Introduction: The Colors on God's Palette,
STAGE ONE: I Love Myself for My Sake,
1. The Journey Begins: Blinded by My Glory,
2. Selfishly Deceived and Hopelessly Proud,
3. Imagining Our Strength and Others' Weakness,
STAGE TWO: I Love God for My Sake,
4. The Good Fortune of a Good God to Help Me on My Journey,
5. The Appearance of Evil-or Good,
6. Refusing Mystery and Creating Fantasy Faith,
STAGE THREE: I Love God for God's Sake,
7. The Confusion of Having a Holy God Who Loves Me,
8. What Is Wrong with the World? We Are,
9. Loving Myself as My Neighbor,
STAGE FOUR: I Love Myself for God's Sake,
10. Receiving God's Forgiveness and Love: Strength for the Journey,
11. Confused by Experience and Spared Success,
12. Where the Road Turns to Water,
Epilogue: Arriving on the Shore of Heaven and Earth,
Gratitudes,
Notes,