Here's an interesting post from Jennifer Fulwiler, a woman who's a relatively recent convert to Catholicism. Though she doesn't use the same language I do to describe and identify barriers to faith, she's definitely recognized that there's more to it than rational questions. For her, indeed, there were major emotional barriers that made the process of choosing to follow Jesus harder.
But what I find so encouraging is that the emotional barriers didn't hold her back forever, any more than whatever intellectual questions she had. She doesn't describe how she worked through them in this post, but she clearly came to the point where she was able to trust Jesus even if it would mess up the way she'd organized and understood her whole life up to that point.
I also have to say that I agree with her number 4 on her list of finding God in 5 steps... She calls this step "Do the Experiment," and she encourages you to live for a time as though you believed that God exists. There's only so much a person can know about God intellectually. As with any relationship, you can't really know someone until you start relating to God. You can know about him based on things you've heard and read, but that's just like learning about the person across the room from the person standing by you. There are so many limits to what you can know about him... and you can't really know him until you meet him. So this is something I occasionally suggest to a friend who is seeking to discern if God is real and who he is.
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