Holy Questions

I like the story of the boy who came to his father and asked, “Dad, who made God?” The father, engrossed in reading the news on his phone, responded, “Beats me, son.” The little boy would not be put off. “Dad, why is the earth round?” The dad answered, “I don’t know, son.” The boy played for a minute, then asked, “Dad, is there life on other planets?” The father patiently answered, “Nobody knows the answer to that.” Finally, the boy asked his father, “Dad, do you mind me asking you all these questions?” The father put down his paper. “Why, not at all, son,” he said, “How else are you going to learn?”

The story is funny. And questions are an important part of life, in order to glean knowledge and wisdom. But it is also true that part of what we have to learn is that there are questions to which there are no answers.

“Why did she get sick?”

“I’m a good person, how did this happen to me?”

“What does all this mean?”

As we journey through life we are confronted with limits to what we can know. We come face to face with deep mystery. In the presence of such unanswered questions, we have a choice about how we face them, how we move forward. We can become angry, or cynical, or bitter. Or we can allow mystery to become holy ground.

You and I both know that the Christian faith is not a tidy system that answers every “why.” It is a relationship with the living God revealed in Jesus. And that means we do not worship certainty — we worship the One who holds us when certainty collapses.

There are things we cannot know: why illness comes, why suffering strikes unevenly, why some prayers seem unanswered. But we do know this: in Christ, God has entered our suffering. The cross tells us that God is not indifferent to our pain.

The father in the story was right in one sense: questions are how we learn. But sometimes what we learn is not an answer. Sometimes what we learn is how to lean. And in the leaning — in the praying, in the waiting, in the refusing to let go — we discover that the God we cannot fully explain is the very God who refuses to let us go.

Let us pray: Eternal God, You are holy, and You are a mystery. And yet, You are loving and as near as our next breath. Guard our hearts from bitterness, and grant us the faith and the courage we need to face the hour — trusting that you are with us even now. Amen.

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