The Doubting Thomas in me!

I can understand the Apostle Thomas.  I am the Doubting Thomas.   I did not used to be.  I took everything with joy and happiness.  Ask anyone who grew up with me.  Raise my parents from the dead and ask them. They would tell you I had a joyful belief.   But I lost them and I went through a devastating divorce and a mind-boggling church fight when I knew I was on the right side of the issue and I found out that I had no idea  what I had gotten myself into.   Most people in the church have no idea why I have removed myself from regular attendance and I write every Sunday morning instead of being Sunday school director and workhorse for First Baptist Church.  But I know why!  I learned, to my eternal dismay, that I made some terrible decisions about the character of everyone who seemed to loom around me and I have continued to doubt my own ability to discern the truth of character of others.   Added to that was the complete mistreatment of me by my own sisters and many of their children and my kindness to them.  Take my sister, Rose Marie.  I have done  nothing to her but somehow she feels justified to remove me from her email and block me on her phone.  I tried to call her this week on her birthday and nothing.   My children and their spouses are the one truth in my life and a few of my trusted friends.   No wonder I doubt;   I have no reason to reach out in faith anymore.  And  I know I have strayed so far from what my parents taught me.   My only consolation is that my Mother told me during the months I was with her that had the same thing happened to her with her relationship with Daddy, she would not have been able to go on. Maybe she knew how hard I had been knocked down spiritually.  But she never dreamed that her own children would behave so badly toward each other!  If she can look down and see this horrible mess, she would turn her back on all of us for not working this out.  And that includes me.

So Thomas, I understand you.   So did the Lord.   He came to you, when you ran from him, and he found you and he told you to put your hands into the wounds.   He gave you something substantial to deal with so that you would find the strength to believe again.   I wish I could be a part of that wonderful moment that you found.  You have no idea how much I wish I could find that moment again!   If I am allowing it to elude me, show me the path to find the moment of joyful belief again!