It is no secret to those who are close to me that I have been suffering through a crisis of faith for the last several months. And to be completely honest, it seems to be a pattern with me. There are at least two ways of looking at this: the first way, my natural inclination, is to look at myself in something of despondency and think of St. James, the Brother of Christ, when he writes:

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded man is unstable in all his ways.

James 1:5-8

But a friend of mine recently pointed out to me that there is another way of understanding this--that of healthy skepticism. Unlike cynicism, a healthy questioning has it's proper place within cycles of growth--it serves as a pruning of our spiritual life, an opportunity to remove dead-growth so that new-growth may take its place.