Steven Curtis Chapman on Choosing to Believe

November 4, 2009 | Posted by Ray Fowler

CT interview: Steven Curtis Chapman shares honestly about the challenge of choosing to believe in the months following the loss of his youngest daughter, 5-year-old Maria Sue, a year and a half ago.

We have absolutely questioned God and had our doubts and said, “Is this whole thing true? Is this real?” I sat on our tour bus last summer and called Scotty Smith, my pastor, after spending a very difficult night of wrestling with God. We were getting ready to go do an interview with People magazine or Larry King or somebody, and I was just in tears, calling my pastor and saying, “Is it really true? Is it really true? Can God be trusted?” … I needed to hear my pastor speak truth again to me. I needed to hear somebody say again, here’s what’s true.

That has been an important process, the whole thing of taking every thought captive and saying, God, this is what I choose to believe. Because I’ve found myself, especially in the first few days and weeks after Maria went to heaven—and there’s still moments of this—that I could almost feel myself being sucked into this black hole of doubt and despair. Of saying, “God, if I let myself keep going in this direction, there seems to be no bottom, no end to this, and I’ll never be able to escape from it.”

At the hospital at Vanderbilt, literally within an hour of knowing that my little girl was in heaven with Jesus, I found myself having to make a choice, when I would start to feel myself and everything in me being sucked into this place, this abyss. I would begin to say, “Blessed be the name of the Lord. You give. You take away. But, God, I trust you. I trust you. You are faithful. You are good. I trust you. I trust you.” And as I would say that, literally just choose to make that declaration in the midst of this, I would almost physically feel myself being pulled back from that place. And I’d start to breathe again.

HT: Justin Taylor