Even pastors travel through detours of doubt. Crossroads of questions. Side roads of skepticism. Ministers are no different from their flock when it comes to these periods of questioning. I'm no exception.

My moments of doubt tend to surface, of all times, on Sunday mornings. I awake early, long before the family stirs, the sunrise flickers or the paper plops on the driveway. Sunday's my big day, the day I stand before a congregation of people who are willing to swap 30 minutes of their time for some conviction and hope.

Most weeks I have ample to go around. But occasionally I don't. Sometimes in the dawn-tinted, prepulpit hours, the seeming absurdity of what I believe hits me. I can remember one Easter in particular. As I reviewed my sermon by the light of a lamp, the resurrection message felt mythic, more closely resembling an urban legend than the gospel truth. Angels perched on cemetery rocks; burial clothing needed, then not; soldiers scared stiff; a was?dead, now-walking Jesus. I half expected the Mad Hatter or the seven dwarfs to pop out of a hole at the turn of a page. A bit of a stretch, don't you think?

Listen in as Lucado offers pastors plenty of tips for more effective preaching.

Sometimes I do. And when I do, I feel an uneasiness you may relate to: the fear that God isn't.

To one degree or another we all venture into the valley of the shadow of doubt—and we all need a plan to escape it. May I share mine? Those Sunday morning sessions of second-guessing dissipate quickly these days thanks to a wellspring of faith bubbling in the final pages of Luke's gospel, where he dedicated his last chapter to answering one question: How does Christ respond when we doubt Him?

He takes us to the Upper Room in Jerusalem. It's Sunday morning following Friday's crucifixion. Jesus' followers had gathered, not to change the world, but to escape it; not as gospel raconteurs, but as scared rabbits.

Periodic doubters of Christ, take note and take heart. The charter followers of Christ had doubts too. But Christ refused to leave them alone with their questions. Earlier, when He spotted two of the disciples trudging toward a village called Emmaus, "Jesus Himself came up and walked along with them" (Luke 24:15, NIV).

And how did he bolster the disciples' faith?

"Jesus took them through the writings of Moses and all the prophets, explaining from all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself" (Luke 24:27, NLT).

Well, what do you know. Christ conducted a Bible class. "As they sat down to eat, He took the bread and blessed it. Then He broke it and gave it to them. Suddenly, their eyes were opened, and they recognized Him" (v. 30, NLT).

Jesus taught the Word and broke the bread, and then like a mist on a July morning, He was gone. The Emmaus men dropped the broken loaf, grabbed their broken dreams, raced back to Jerusalem and burst in on the apostles. They blurted out their discovery ...

And just as they were telling about it, Jesus Himself was suddenly standing there among them. "Peace be with you," He said. But the whole group was startled and frightened, thinking they were seeing a ghost!

"Why are you frightened?" He asked. "Why are your hearts filled with doubt?"

(Don't hurry past Christ's causal connection between fright and doubt. Unanswered qualms make for quivering disciples.)

"Look at My hands. Look at My feet. ... Touch Me and make sure that I am not a ghost." As He spoke, He showed them His hands and His feet. ...

Then He said, "When I was with you before, I told you that everything written about Me in the law of Moses and the prophets and in the Psalms must be fulfilled." Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures (vv. 39-40, 44-45, NLT).

Here we find two practical answers to the critical question, what would Christ have us do with our doubts?

Touch My body and ponder My story.

We still can, you know. We can still touch the body of Christ. We'd love to touch His physical wounds and feel the flesh of the Nazarene. Yet when we brush up against the church, we do just that.

Questions can make hermits out of us, driving us into hiding. Yet the cave has no answers. Christ distributes courage through community; He dissipates doubts through fellowship. He never deposits all knowledge in one person but distributes pieces of the jigsaw puzzle to many. When you interlock your understanding with mine, and we share our discoveries with them ... when we mix, mingle, confess and pray, Christ speaks.

And when He speaks, He shares His story. God's go-to therapy for doubters is his own Word.

Could it be this simple? Could the chasm between doubt and faith be spanned with Scripture and fellowship? Next time the shadows come, return to the ancient stories of Moses, the prayers of David, the testimonies of the gospels and the epistles of Paul. Join with other seekers, and make daily walks to Emmaus. And if a kind stranger joins you on the road with wise teaching ... consider inviting Him over for dinner.

It's the same counsel you'd give a doubting church member. It helps return me to the path. I pray it will do the same for you.

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