I got the chance to talk to a dear friend this morning. We are both surgeons, wives, and moms. We talk about our kids, our work, our marriages. And we talk about our faith. Or what’s left of it anyway. We both grew up in similar types of churches and shared a good number of similar conservative beliefs. But throughout the last few years, we have both been searching in our faith journey. Questioning, leaning in in some areas, and pulling away in others. We’ve been hurt by some religious traditions that marginalize women and we remain frustrated by the vitriol that spews from too many pulpits. Today, we talked about how we are struggling to determine what really matters in our faith these days and how to talk about faith with our kids when we are still so lost in our own confusion.

As surgeons, we seem to relate so much of life to our work. We talked about watching our sons play baseball and how the sport is an intensely mental one. She said, “Baseball is really an individual sport played together,” referring to how each player is responsible for their own territory and mistakes are glaringly obvious. Baseball is a mental game, in particular, the way a pitcher must make dozens of tiny but crucial decisions from the mound, and get inside the head of the batter to deter his ability to connect with the ball. She drew an analogy to surgery that in intense situations in the OR, we have to keep our head in the game, pull ourselves together, and not get spooked by the full count with the game-winning run on 3rd base. Just focus and do our jobs.

She is right. And as surgeons, especially trauma surgeons, we also want tidy and quick answers to life-threatening problems. We track our outcomes, we time our cases, we know when we have complications and we rapidly work to correct the underlying problem or error. So as surgeons, we seem to want quick and tidy answers to life’s hard questions, too. I have been frustrated that it’s taking me so long to make sense of my faith. I want this process tied up in a bow. Instead, I have found myself in this messy middle for quite some time now.

In surgery and in baseball, decisions can and should be made safely, decisively, and rapidly. But in my faith…not so much. I am having to shift my mindset some. And give myself the grace and time to work through things slowly and with deep thought and exploration. I am trying to keep my eyes on Jesus and turn down the noise of so much else.

In her podcast, Kate Boyd talks about not laying out a timeline to detangle our faith. I don’t have to have things figured out in a matter of weeks or months. What I do have to do is keep searching, keep trying, and keep my eyes on Jesus. No need to hurry.

Disclaimer: My viewpoints are not necessarily reflective of my employer, or any local, regional or national organization that I belong to. As a matter of fact, I pretty much just speak for myself. Please keep that in mind.