Charlotte Pence Bond reveals that she has struggled with faith despite growing up in a religious family. She entertained spiritual doubts and atheism until she found out that Jesus is the ultimate answer to her questions.
Charlotte Pence Bond
The middle child of Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence talks about “spiritual doubts” in her recent podcast. The program titled, “Doubting It”, invites listeners to engage with their questions of faith. “And how seeking truth can strengthen our faith in God and deepen our relationship with Him.”
“I think that doubt is something that most people experience when they are kind of going through their faith journey or they are figuring out what they believe,” the 27-year-old said.
Charlotte shared her own similar faith journey. It started when she went to study her junior year at the University of Oxford in England. She admitted that she lived a “double-life”.
“I did not act like a Christ-follower on the off days, I guess on the days that I wasn’t surrounded by people who were.” She said, “I really was kind of living a little bit of a double life. I was trying to get away with hanging out with people I shouldn’t have been hanging out with, doing things I shouldn’t have been doing and thinking that ‘I can still believe this but I just don’t have to follow these rules.’”
Then she started seriously questioning her faith. She refused invites from her Christian friends and took an interest in atheism. She read writings about it and got close to atheist professors.
Ever-pursuant God
But despite her ‘actively running away’ from God, God kept running after her. God encountered her when she was listening to a worship song.
“I just felt this overwhelming presence around me.“I really can’t describe it as anything other than that.” She continued, “I felt that God was accepting me back. It was almost this literal feeling of falling into somebody’s arms that have forgiven you, saying: ‘I still want you. I still want you back even though you ran away from me. I still want you.’ That was really when I completely gave my life to Christ.”
“During this time abroad, that was really a time in my life when I was given the liberty and the freedom and the space to have doubts, to have questions, to wonder … if this is something that I believe and to what extent. The biggest realization I had was that Christianity was real and I couldn’t be halfway in. I couldn’t have one foot out the door all the time,” she said.
Today, as Charlotte is pursuing her master’s in theological studies, she has noticed a “shift” in the young generation in their perspectives about religion. “But what I have noticed, at least a little bit of my theory about why millennials tend to be ‘less religious’ than other generations, I think is maybe partially to do with this doubt idea. We aren’t talking about the questions that we have,” she said.
She added, “Trusting God doesn’t mean that we never have doubts. But we have to be honest about our doubts.”
Reference: The Christian Post
