You heard me. Answers are the pits. They are dead ends. They teach you nothing.
Yes but...they're so nice. They come packaged in little boxes, complete with orderly labels. I can file them away on the shelves of my mind so easily. After that, I don't have to deal with them!
Questions, on the other hand, are so....blobby. Misshapen. And they change! Kind of like flubber, come to think of it. They don't stay in boxes. And when they ooze between the cracks or bust out the lid, they get all over the answers neatly stacked around them and screw those up too! Questions are messy.
Questions are also uncomfortable. They get stuck in places, and you run into them when you're trying to get to an answer.
I know the answer is there, if I can just get past this stupid question... I need to ask the right person, read the right book, hear the right sermon - then it will go away. We hide our questions, convinced that we are the only ones with this gooey chaos, ashamed that our boxes aren't in order, worried that it will make us less credible, less mature, less real.
But that's the thing: the questions are way more real than any of the answers we have already boxed up. They are here. Now. They point to things we need to work on, or remind us of things we should pay more attention to. They do us much more good than answers do.
So you have to learn to live with the questions. And I don't mean just tolerate them until the answer shows up. I mean stop waiting around for the answer. Love the
question. Explore it. Carry it with you. Walk around it, study it from different angles. Give it room to mold and flow. Maybe even give it room to mold
you.
Open up the question and look inside, understand where it came from. Let it change as you walk through life. Let your approach to it change. Come up with half-answers, then ditch them and build something new when the old doesn't fit anymore. Let the question grow with you. Let it make you grow.
Perhaps most importantly, don't hide the question. Bring it into the light. Talk about it. Show it to people. Maybe they will see new angles that you couldn't. Maybe they have the same question, or one like it, and you can show them new angles.
Maybe they will have never before seen anything like your question. Maybe they will have no idea what to say. But they can still help you carry that wibbly-wobbly, uncomfortable mess.
I don't know. That's a good question. Lets keep working on it.
"Well yeah, that's all good and fine for you to say. Sounds like a walk in the park when you put it like that. But these questions are hard! They
hurt. They don't feel like flubber at all. Most of the time it's more like running into a brick wall. How can you tell me to love that?!"
I know. Believe me,
I know. I've felt that brick wall. But I've also felt that box. That made-up, held together by tape and desperation, suffocating box of an answer. I thought it was enough. I thought it was better. But then I let it fall apart, and I was able to see the beauty of the question. And I could finally
breathe again.
Yeah, answers are alright for some things. But it's the questions that make you who you are. It's the questions that make you grow. It's the questions that determine your journey.
It's the questions that I have come to love.
