that trust means letting go of the need to know, of the need to be certain. And a long and honored Christian practice, diverse as it is, already existed that understood that process.

Placeholder theology is the very nature of theology. By it we acknowledge the human need to say something about ultimate meaning concerning the Creator and the creation while also understanding that what we say will never say it all.

The problem isn't the Bible. The problem is coming to the Bible with expectations it's not set up to bear.

When we are taught that the Bible has to meet these unrealistic expectations for our faith to be genuine, the end product is a fragile, nervous faith.

Maybe the Bible isn't God's owner's manual for us that answers all our questions about God and lays a script out for us to follow as we walk along the Christian path.

Whether we are aware of it or not, behind our religious deliberations, in one form or another, we are really asking a deeply foundational question, "What kind of God do I believe in, really?" This is not a luxury question for those with idle time on their hands, but exactly the kind of question we should deliberately bring to the front of our consciousness as an expression of responsible faith; it is not evidence that our faith is weakening.

The point is that Proverbs 26:4—5 doesn't tell me what to do. It wasn't designed to. It models something better: the permission to think it through, figure it out, and learn from experience for next time. In fact, more than just giving us permission, the contradiction sets up our expectation that we will have to think it through.

But in resisting, we may actually be missing an invitation to take a sacred journey, where we let go of needing to be right and trust God regardless of what we feel we know or don't know.

Wisdom is about learning how to work through the unpredictable, uncontrollable messiness of life so you can figure things out on your own in real time.

If I were king of Christianity, after limiting church services to forty-five minutes and sermons to ten, as well as outlawing church "share time" altogether, I would proclaim a kingdom-wide decree that, at least for a while until we get it, "believe" should be stricken from all of our Bibles and replaced with trust.

Perhaps her long dark night fueled her life, where she kept moving anyway, as an act of trust so deep it cannot be rationally explained—and indeed would look foolish if anyone tried. And the result was about as clear a Jesus movement as you can point to in recent history. Mother Teresa learned

But a faith that requires us to hold on to what we "know" becomes, we eventually discover, inadequate for handling the peaks and valleys of our humanity. It's also exhausting to try to hold it all together as it once was.