The pastor who let me doubt

I was twenty-four, in seminary, and quietly falling apart — because the more I studied, the less certain I became, and I thought certainty was the job.

Gene was seventy, had pastored the same small church for thirty years, and when I finally confessed my doubts he laughed — warmly — and said, "Son, I've buried enough people to know that certainty was never the assignment. Faithfulness is."

He never once tried to argue me back to certainty. He just kept showing up — to my questions, my ordination, my first funeral. He treated my doubt like weather, not rebellion.

Forty years later, I try to be for young doubters what Gene was for me: unshocked, unhurried, and there.