Have words illuminated something that was brewing within you and aching to surface? I was thinking back to the wise words that have spoken into my life. It’s some sort of crazy that the thoughts, musings or wisdoms that someone penned many years ago will live a life of their own. I thought back to a quote by T.B. LaBerge. He might of typed these words into his tumblr page versus have written them decades ago in some insightful theology book but they no less left my life changed.

“The greatest tragedy in humanity is when we do not wrestle with God, when we become so apathetic that we are but a limp rag doll in the hands of a mighty lover who wishes that we fight back; that we embrace Him and choose to find truth.

Take your doubts to Christ, let this fire grow inside you and become aware that He is wanting a heart that beats and seeks knowledge, He wants a mind that thinks and learns wisdom, and He wants a soul that cries out for help when it seems impossible to find.”

I can’t begin to tell you the life that these words breathed into my life. For so long I had felt suffocated by the need to put up a facade of Christian perfectionism. How could I escape it? Where was my permission to come to Christ as I truly was—broken, angry, doubting and full of questions. And how was I, in my brokenness and doubt, supposed to be a witness to others? I struggled to answer the many uncomfortable questions my unsaved friends asked of me. I felt awful for having questions and even worse for not having answers. Little did I know, this was the exact heart that God wanted and the exact heart He desired to mold.

Questions became my power, because I gave them over to someone all powerful.

This quote by T.B. LaBerge relabeled my shame in having questions and doubts to having “a heart that beats and seeks knowledge.” My perspective changed. I let questions become power, knowing even if the answers took days, weeks or years, that I wouldn’t be a limp rag doll at the hands of God but rather someone fully alive, passionately seeking truth. Let me tell you, the answers don’t come all at once. I still have questions. But I urge you, if you have big questions or doubts that you're afraid of, please bring them before God. Do not shy away from Him if you think your questions challenge Him or disappoint Him. He is looking for someone who is willing to think and willing to listen. You are at the hands of a master creator and you will not be left empty handed or alone.


Questions became my power, because I gave them over to someone all powerful. The burden of finding answers to life’s hardest questions was no longer on me and I was left with the simple task of loving and getting to understand the people around me. It became my great honor to sit in gritty questions with friends who had been hurt by the church, gay friends, atheist friends and friends of many, many backgrounds. That is radical! Let that sink in a moment, that God will take something broken and use it for honor. The growth that He brought me through, the places that questioning took me, it was painful. But at the end of the day He used chaos and He used questioning for His glory. I would encourage anyone reading this to not get bogged down with the need to have perfect answers to speak into the lives of the unsaved. God opens eyes and trades hearts of stone for those of flesh, He is the agent of change. We, on the other hand, have the pleasure of being used by Him despite our “not knowing enough,” our doubts and our questionings.

Do not cheat yourself from seeking truth by settling for comfort, that is not what you were destined for. You were not meant to live life as a limp rag doll at the hands of a mighty lover. Fight back. Choose truth.

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” -C.S. Lewis



Michelle Menkel is a junior Engineering Physics major planning on entering the medical field. She is passionate about finding that healthy balance between vegetables and Oreos and will bust a move to early 2000s R&B.