How to find faith in times of doubt

One moment, I felt like a failure, like my efforts bore no fruit. And just minutes later, God gave me a reminder from my friend: The fruits of our labor take time to grow.

Once, when I had to write a major term paper, I was experiencing serious writer’s block. After weeks of procrastination, a friend advised me that I needed to trust in my writing abilities and just write something.

At the last minute, I sat down and, pulling an all-nighter in the process, finished the paper. It wasn’t perfect, but it was done. With a feeling a triumph, I submitted the essay — perfectionism conquered.

Just a day later, the professor replied with his comments. After just three pages, he had made 70+ revisions, at which point he had stopped reading. He advised me to thoroughly re-think the whole thing and to resubmit after an extension.

It hit me like a gut punch. This wasn’t how the story was supposed to go! I felt like a failure, and didn’t understand why God would let this happen. My labor seemed to bear no fruit. I slumped in my chair.

Just then, I received an email notification. It was from a classmate who I met 10 years ago in undergrad; I had not heard from her since. She wrote to inform me that she had been deeply impacted by a conversation we had shared almost a decade ago. In her email, she explained how our conversation led her through a whole range of experiences, eventually prompting her — just a few months ago — to be received into the Catholic Church. Now, she wanted to thank me for the fruit my words had borne in her life.

There I was: One moment, I felt like a failure, like my efforts bore no fruit. And just minutes later, God gave me a reminder from my friend: The fruits of our labor take time to grow. It took 10 years for that simple conversation to bear fruit in my friend’s life, and yet it made a big difference to her.

It helped me to reframe the present “failure” with my paper as a “fruit” still growing, not to be harvested until farther down the road.

So, if you are facing challenges, failures, and doubts in your life, take a second to recollect the surprising fruits of the past — especially when they came in similar times of challenge, failure, and doubt.

By believing that God will provide now just as he provided then, we can live in genuine faith that this, too, shall bear fruit — even if we know not how.

This is part of the series called “The Human Being Fully Alive” found here.