"Live with the Question"

“Live with the Question”

“Live with the question.”  That was the final suggestion given by one coordinator of the field education program at a divinity school to new students.  It is also a very helpful recommendation for people of faith.  One of the opening chapters of Zora Neale Hurston’s literary classic, They Eyes Were Watching God begins, “There are years for questions and there are years for answers.”  A living faith swings back and forth like a pendulum.  However, we seriously shortchange our potential to develop knowledge, understanding and wisdom when we fail to appreciate the years of lingering questions.

I strongly suggest that we discard the notion that questioning and faith are mutually exclusive.  It seems only reasonable that one would inquire about the causes of difficult experiences.  You want to know what caused the fatal accident that took the life of your loved one.  How did you develop cancer or some other critical condition?  How do you make sense of an unjust termination from your job?  What about the most inconvenient timing of a layoff when you just closed on a new house?  These practical questions soon become theological ones.  We begin to ask about the presence and goodness of God.  Where is He?  Why didn’t He intervene?  Why did He allow these things to happen?  These questions do not undermine our faith.  If asked humbly and followed by a sincere desire to seek faithful answers, they become a new beginning in the journey of faith.

Living with the question requires the honest admission of our doubts.  Perhaps, some experiences made us cynical.  Yet, some believers curtail spiritual maturity by suppressing questions.  They settle for illogical clichés and superstitious acts.  Others think that ignoring these questions helps them to resolve the difficulties.  In time, however, the emotions that undergird these questions culminate in depression, frustration and harmful choices.  Fostering intellectual honesty and personal integrity to acknowledge your questions is the first step in answering them.

Additionally, living with the question necessitates the willingness to leave one’s comfort zone.  Life’s most powerful questions do not lend themselves to neat categories of safe and easy answers.  The process of resolving them takes a long time.  Besides patience, one must willingly engage the struggle of discarding fallacious answers; finding more suitable answers; and then later discarding them as ineffective.   Not surprisingly, one is still left living with the question.  But, the fight for reasonable answers and a practically applicable faith often resembles a roller coaster ride.  The frightening challenge and thrill of the ride never exceed the satisfaction of its completion.

One of the New Testament’s most compelling stories is found in Mark 9:14-27.  Jesus heals a boy who had suffered with epilepsy all of his life.  The boy’s father humbly asks Jesus to heal his son.  After detailing the length and depth of his son’s agony, the father says to Jesus, “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”  Jesus responds, “If you can?  Everything is possible for him who believes.”  Most interestingly, the afflicted boy’s father says, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24)

Those immortal words describe the existential dilemma of living with the question.  Questioning is not a matter of skepticism.  Rather, it is a matter of incomplete faith.  Only the sincere process of wading through the shallow and deep waters of ambiguity, confusion and perplexity leads to genuine, intellectually respectable and experientially worthwhile faith.  Moreover, living with the question demands a truthful disclosure of our heartfelt feelings of impotence and hopelessness and the anger and resentment that accompany them.  The father’s willingness to state his reservations about the possibility of his son’s healing ironically empowers him with the faith that heals his son. 

When we earnestly live with the question, eventually we find incredible rewards.  This process gives the gift of better questions, which deepen and strengthen our faith.  Another gift is reasonable answers that help us shed the naiveté of infantile beliefs and childhood morality.  A third reward of this process is a balanced, integrated life that includes inner healing and wholeness.  Yet, the greatest benefit of living with the question is the emerging revelation and appreciation of an awesome and loving God who utilizes our questions to establish a closer relationship with Him.  Live with the question!