President Uchtdorf taught “It’s natural to have questions—the acorn of honest inquiry has often sprouted and matured into a great oak of understanding. There are few members of the Church who, at one time or another, have not wrestled with serious or sensitive questions. One of the purposes of the Church is to nurture and cultivate the seed of faith—even in the sometimes sandy soil of doubt and uncertainty. Faith is to hope for things which are not seen but which are true. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters—my dear friends—please, first doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith. We must never allow doubt to hold us prisoner and keep us from the divine love, peace, and gifts that come through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The purpose of doubting our doubts then is to prevent them from becoming an end unto themselves, to keep them, and the fear the engender, from becoming our master. Since we are each free to choose whether we will doubt the doubts, or empower them, it is important to know what it means to doubt them, and how that can be accomplished. The following are suggestions for different techniques we can choose that will help us to doubt our doubts, and to keep them in their proper place until they are refuted or resolved:
1. Acknowledge Them
The call for us to doubt our doubts is not a call for us to cast them aside, to bury them, or struggle to ignore them. Doubts are real, and they will not go away until they are resolved by the light of truth. To engage in a fiction that if they are ignored long enough they will simply leave, is like ignoring the warning signs of cancer, a heart attack or a stroke. Ignored they will only become worse. No, it is much better to face them head on, to accept that they are real and that they need to be dealt with. In fact, accepting the existence of the doubts is the first step to doubting them. However, acknowledging our doubts does NOT mean we surrender to them or make more of them than they really are. Doubts will persist and seek to grow, yearning to attract all our attention if possible, to keep us from the many other necessary and life enriching activities. Activities that in a way help us to keep the proper perspective. Doubts will strive to appear to us as the invincible dragon, when they are in fact merely thorns in the flesh.
NEXT....2. Expose Them