Some weeks my faith feels solid and then the doubt rolls straight back in. Why does it keep swinging like this, and does it ever settle?

“Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? Selah.”

Asaph writes in the middle of a night he cannot sleep through, asking whether God has abandoned him permanently and forgotten how to be merciful. Those questions sit in the middle of the psalm without ever being answered directly. What turns the poem is his decision to remember what God has done before. The swing is broken by deliberate recall rather than by a new feeling.

“And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

A father has brought his son to the disciples, who could not help, and by the time he reaches Jesus he is down to conditional language. His answer is a sentence that holds belief and unbelief together in the same breath, and Jesus acts on it anyway. Mark kept the line in the record. Divided faith is treated here as real faith, not as disqualification.