Doubt is room for growth

Doubt is a real bastard.

I asked some of the other priests once how they know if what they’re doing is what the spirit wants for sure, and they laughed at me. In the end, it appears to be a deeply intimate communication, which is not repeated, and you are left to figure out what it is you are intended to do to accomplish it. Between the communication and the resolution of the situation, there’s a lot of room for doubt. Did I hear correctly? Am I doing this right? Does this mean what I think it does?

If you let it, more insidious doubts: what if I only thought I was told that? What if I only wanted to be told that?

You do not have to let it. You do not have to entertain doubt.

At the beginning of this year, at the ceremony to open the year, I was told to have faith. It is now, in the space between communication on something I’m working on, and the result, that I have time to entertain doubt and remember that ceremony, the rather sombre look on Papa Guede’s face as he said it, this eyes intently focused on me.

I have time to think and realize that doubt is room for growth. It is the space between the communication, the act, and the result that allows us to see how willing we are to believe what the spirits tell us, to trust ourselves and the spirits, and to test the nature of our commitment to the spirit. And if we heard wrong, if we made a mistake, to understand and correct whatever lead us to make that mistake, all easily within the eternity we have to learn.

When you put it like that, at least for me, it becomes a very different space. I am not waiting to be proven wrong or right, I am expanding into a more established pattern of collaboration with the spirit. Doubt is room for that growth to happen, room to better understand myself, my commitment, and the spirits’ communication with me.

Doubt might be a real bastard, but it’s a damn good lesson.