November 9, 2025
Father, I believe; help me with my unbelief.
Most honest thing anyone ever said to God. This father with a sick kid, desperate, saying yes and no in the same breath. That’s it. That’s the whole deal.
The story’s simple enough. God comes down, walks around, dies, comes back. Believe it and you’re saved. Done.
Except what’s “believe” mean? You can say it. Say it every Sunday. Live the other six days like you never said it at all. That doesn’t track. Then you crack open the Bible—all those rules stacked on top of rules, God angry then loving then angry again—and simple gets complicated real fast.
So you close the book. Go back to zero.
Zero’s where you land when you lose the plot. Empty. But not nothing. The Mayans had it right, drawing it like a shell, like a closed fist. One thing ending, another starting. Both at once.
We’re always looking for patterns. Signs in the chaos. Maybe that’s the point—the looking, not the finding. The universe runs like a pocket watch, all gears and springs, exact. Crazy thing is, it’s wild too. Ticking in time, outside time. Both.
Paley had this example I always liked. You’re walking through the woods, find a watch in the dirt. Look at those springs, those gears—too organized to be random. Someone made it. Had to. The universe is way more complex than any watch. So how’s it just here? There’s a watchmaker somewhere. Has to be.
Everything breaks down simple if you let it. Yes or no. Zero or one. Except maybe it doesn’t. Maybe belief and unbelief aren’t on the same line at all—not opposite ends of a scale where more of one means less of the other. Maybe they just exist together. Grey, not black and white.
Here we are with our alphabet and numbers, sticks and stones we’ve arranged into words, trying to talk about the thing that breathed the universe into being. Little presumptuous, right? Using our pocket-watch logic to explain the watchmaker.
But that father didn’t care about the logic. He just said both things out loud. I believe. Help my unbelief. Held them both in his hands at once.
The Mayans’ shell. Paley’s watch. The sick kid who got healed. All pointing at the same thing—nothing and everything in the same spot.
The story bends so far from believable it comes back around, touches it again. Circle meeting itself. Zero.
I believe. Help me with my unbelief.
That’s where you find it. Not in picking one or the other. Not in the grey becoming white. Just there—in admitting we’re trying to describe infinity with twenty-six letters and ten numbers.
In saying both things and meaning both things.
In the gap we can’t close.


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