Doubt - SE StudentsSample

How Long O Lord?

Have you ever felt forgotten, defeated, alone, abandoned, neglected, isolated, or alienated? Maybe these feelings were just for a moment on your first day of school or first time to your church’s student ministry. Doubt begins to form when these feelings and emotions last longer than a moment—the moments turn into days, days into weeks, weeks into months, and the months all blur together. 

What happens when it’s not just the people around you who seem uninterested, but you also feel like God doesn’t care? Doubt creeps in when the suffering you are experiencing seems to go unnoticed—when it feels like God is uninterested with your pain, your hurt, your heart, and your experience. Doubt is part of the human experience; if you struggle with doubt and find yourself questioning God, you are not alone. In fact, you’re in really good company. In this week’s passage (Psalm 13) the author started out with a painfully honest question. The author wrote, “O Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever?” 

Everyone can relate to doubt. That doesn’t make it easy, but it can bring you some comfort to know you aren’t alone if you’re asking God, “how long?” How long will the fighting between my parents continue? How long will I be sick? How long will the cancer linger? How long will my friends ignore me? How long will I feel isolated and alone? How long Lord? This week, we want to give you tools that will help you walk through each day, through the doubts you might be facing, and equip you for the doubts that are sure to come later in life. Here are the tools: Confess the problem, commit to pray, speak a promise. Problem, prayer, and promise. This is the pattern we’ll see in Psalm 13.