As a teenager, I told several friends and mentors that I was struggling with doubts about God. You know what most people told me? “You need to have more faith.” 

They were well-meaning, but that answer is about as helpful as asking for help with a math equation and being told, “You need to know the answer.”

Thank God, eventually I had at least one mentor who gave me a good answer. All the rest had inadvertently led me further down a road of doubt. The type of faith they were telling me to have was blind faith. None of them called it “blind faith” of course, but that is in effect what they were promoting.

At the time, the best way I could describe faith was that it was feeling of being connected to God. Part of me felt like the doubts were my fault, that they were sins clouding that pure feeling of closeness to God that I’d once felt. The other part of me felt it was God’s fault. In frustration, I would ask Him why He wouldn’t restore that feeling of closeness again. It would be easy for Him, I thought, and I didn’t know why He didn’t.

Maybe God was testing me. Maybe I just needed to wait out this feeling of doubt, and God would return to me the elation of a new believer. Yet I couldn’t help doubting that would ever happen. I read my Bible, I prayed, I even fasted. Still the doubts kept on.

I was spiraling deeper and deeper, fearing where it would lead me, until at last I spoke with a pastor who had a different answer. It was just a quick conversation — he only had 5 minutes until a meeting that day, so he kept things short and to the point.  But it’s what began to make all the difference for me.

I told him I was doubting my faith. He asked, “What are you doubting specifically?” I answered, “I’m not sure Jesus really existed.”

Without skipping a beat, he asked me “Do you believe George Washington existed?” I said yes. “How do you know he did?” he asked. I thought about it and realized, “I’m actually not sure.”

He explained, “We believe George Washington existed because we have good historical evidence to believe so. We also have great historical evidence that Jesus existed, so there’s no more reason to doubt Jesus existed than George Washington.”

I never forgot that exchange. Not everything clicked right away, but I was struck by how different his view of faith was from what I had been hearing and believing. It almost seemed too simple, worldly even. I had been obsessed with this mysterious, overly spiritual, feel-good aspect of faith that I thought I had to somehow muster up in my soul. What he suggested that day was that I could do some historical digging and find actual answers there.

Soon after that discussion, I discovered the ministry of Ravi Zacharias. He introduced me to apologetics. (Apologetics is the study of reasons for confidence in the truth of Christianity.) I ate up apologetics books and audio — and my faith began growing into a stronger faith than I’d ever had.

That was when I realized how I’d been viewing faith wrong from the beginning. As a new believer, I had been “on fire” for the Lord, but when those strong emotions fizzled out I doubted my faith. Emotions aren’t a stable enough foundation. I needed reasons to believe, real evidence for what I considered true.

Or here’s another way to look at it: The problem with my blind faith was that I was trying to stoke a fire of emotion within my heart — but I was doing it with my eyes closed and my mind uninvolved. When I discovered apologetics, I finally saw the solid evidence that God had already graciously provided.

The Bible never expects believers to have blind faith. Our God is far too kind for that.

This article originally appeared at Apolothink.com. Republished with permission.