Essential Life Questions… Keep Asking!

If you go to the “religious” section of a bookstore in this country, you’ll find a vast array of books on an even wider variety of topics. More and more of them tackle such spiritual “problems” such as building wealth, living happy and stress-free, managing your time efficiently, more daily devotionals that can be counted, more Bible translations than are really needed, and a smorgasbord of so-called “end times” books that are filled with endless futuristic speculation, rampant political hearsay, theological shallowness and more biblical proof-texting than should be legally allowed.

Our “cultural Christianity” is providing shallow answers to anemic questions.

Meanwhile, essential questions – questions that probe into the meaning of our existence and the mysterious presence of the oftentimes even more mysterious Living God in our lives – are largely being ignored.

I know what you’re thinking: what “essential questions”? An excellent (and essential!) question.

I recently ran across a list of some of what I would call Essential Life Questions, or E.L.Q. Some I’ve added myself…

>Why does God let people die.... so young?
>Why does it seem that mean people get the most money?
>If God is with me, then why is life so hard all the time?
>Why do killers go free and honest men and women die of cancer?
>Why does God allow millions of people to die each day from starvation and disease, war, violence and crime?
>If we can ask God for forgiveness at our last breath, like the thief on the cross with Jesus, then why strive for a godly life in the present?
>I prayed for God to heal my mother, but she died anyway. Why didn’t God say “yes” to my prayers?
>Either God is in control of everything and all the crap we see today is part of his plan (which I don't want to accept), or it’s all out of control (which sucks too). What’s up?
>Why do people who claim to love Jesus have such judgmental and derogatory comments about everybody else who’s not Jesus?
>What does God want me to be doing with my life? And why doesn’t just come right out and tell me?

I certainly do not claim to have fully adequate answers to any of these questions. And that makes me feel very inadequate, irrelevant and, at times, completely useless.

I have a Master of Divinity degree; I have seven years experience as a pastor and preacher; I have completed a chaplain residency at a major hospital; I work professionally as a chaplain to hospice patients. I offer comfort and counsel; I pray and study the Bible. I teach others the mysteries of the Word.

I get asked these (and other) questions all the time and, at times, I feel as if any answer I give is too shallow, too mechanical, too contrived and perhaps even just plain false.

Yet these are what I have called “essential” questions! Shouldn’t these questions, above all, be answered?

They should, but not in the way we might think. Consider these words of Jesus…

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matthew 7:7-8)

Sounds simple enough. Yet to those who have asked and sought and knocked know different. We do not always receive what we’ve asked for immediately – and not even as we asked for it! We do not always find what we’re looking for when we want to find it. And the door does not open automatically simply because we’ve asked.

And then it occurs to us: we’ve begun to grow up. The old Sunday school answers simply aren’t adequate anymore. The black and white, yes or no formulas no longer apply.

So we are faced with a choice: We can either continue to grow up and struggle daily with picking up our crosses and following Jesus; or we can continue to stunt our growth by asking the same old tired questions (perhaps in different ways, just for the sake of variety) and getting the same old tired answers.

Personally, I’ve opted for the first choice. Not all the time, of course, but at least I’d like to think I’m continuing to follow Jesus further into the mysteries of the Kingdom.

Perhaps that is why I continue to struggle so much in my walk with Jesus. It’s not for lack of faith. I mean, I do believe and all. At heart of my struggle is my continued amazement at the definite lack of clearly defined, neat and orderly answers.

At some point in following Jesus, I inwardly resolved to dispense with easy answers that are safe and sterile. In the words of Tom Wright, it’s “Better to be puzzled at the strange things that Jesus is doing to me and in me than settle for an easily grasped half-truth with neither depth nor power.” (The Crown and the Fire: Meditations on the Cross and the Life of the Spirit, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1992: 15-16)

And I am so often truly puzzled by what Jesus is doing “to me and in me.” He never said it would be easy; in fact, he told me I had to die in order to live the new life he is giving me.

Theological shallowness and spiritual frivolity are the sworn enemies of such an undertaking. And I’ll have nothing more to do with them.