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So I’ve been thinking about questions…
As we grow from childhood, we naturally ask questions, wanting to know how the world works so we can find our place in it. Our parents, our teachers, our peers, and our own exploration offer answers to our questions. When we’re young, we tend to take those responses at face value and accept them as truth—as something reliable, safe upon which to build another step into the world.
Sooner or later, we begin to recognize conflicting information and inconsistent evidence.
We get suspicious.
Suddenly the teacher seems to not know anything for certain at all. Maybe the neighbor or an auntie tells us things we resonate with much more than with what Dad and Mom say. A friend has more satisfactory explanations.
Through grade school, through college, into our careers, in our everyday lives, we watch an awful lot of debate going on about what’s true and right. Views shift. Collectively and individually, ideas once embraced are held at a distance now, overnight, or over time. New information comes to light. Disagreement springs up.
People act on decisions, often stupidly and selfishly. And people get hurt.
Was it wrong, untrue? Unreliable according to whose standard? What changed?
Or is it just difference of opinion and preference?
To compound the bewilderment, we also realize that the external answer is frequently at considerable odds with our internal signals. And sometimes we find out that questions cause more problems.
Where am I going with this?
We’re in process, whether we admit it or not.
Everyone is, all the time.
Why is it so hard sometimes to admit that we’re in process, that we didn’t emerge from the womb with every necessary opinion fully formed? Even though no one would look anyone in the eye and say You should already know everything, some of us function as though we believe it.
For a while, I dated a guy who wouldn’t accept that something his father had believed was a common but inaccurate interpretation of the Bible about leadership in the church. When I pressed him on this, he as much as said that if his dad had been wrong, he—my date—would have built his life on a lie and he’d have to rethink his whole life. He was convinced of this. Thus he never examined his father’s thinking on that one passage and was extremely unhappy that I had challenged it. Never mind that the fallout of that belief and a lot of other accompanying fruit was neglectful and sour. Which this guy apparently could not see for the abuse it was.
Was it the idea that he’d have to admit he’d been wrong—that his father had been wrong, human and fallible? Was it the fear of having to think for himself?
I think about young people who leave the faith of their upbringing as soon as they can. I think of adults who suddenly decide that the cognitive dissonance between their church experience and what they need in their hearts is just too great, and out they go.
I think about individuals who have some level of leadership in the church and in the secular sphere until they change their minds about something and begin to admit it aloud. Pastors and missionaries who labor in the field for years, then walk away or turn to atheism.
These departures and redirects feel so seismic personally and in our communities. They should be, when abuse—emotional, spiritual, physical, sexual, any—is involved. But even when it’s one person deciding to about face for reasons they can’t articulate well, we can be shaken to our core. Betrayal and bitterness raise their self-righteous heads.
When someone changes their mind, the result is often ex-communication from the group, loss of mutual companionship, or loss of leadership. We who remain are forced to decide whether we’d been told a lie ourselves, that we might have to reexamine our own beliefs. We might have to admit that we had ourselves perpetuated some kind of harm to someone else because of acting on what we believed to be truth.
Those sitting under any ministry process what they hear according to what they already have in their hearts and minds from earlier questions. Usually, there arise even more frustrating and urgent questions. Sometimes questioners come away with demands they cannot reconcile with their internal voices. Sometimes they come away with condemnation.
But each of us is responsible for continuing to seek. Seek better understanding of the God we were introduced to. Seek to forgive those who doled out harmful messages, and perhaps forgive ourselves.
Why is it so hard to embrace the questioning and course changes that are the stuff of rational living?
Anyone who has sat under ministry of any stripe is responsible to press in to God Himself, which inevitably means questioning man’s representations of God. Our connection to truth is broken and so the pieces that get patched together are inevitably lacking.
To some degree the church, and for that matter, the secular marketplace, teaches us to squash our questions in favor of external behavior, whether we are young or not so young. Typically, we are not given tools or safety from which to explore, nor are we encouraged to honor our inner whispers that want other answers.
But we must either learn to become OK with being in process or we will break under the unrelenting dissonance. In some fashion, we will break.
No one is irrevocably assigned a single belief and the resultant state of being. Everyone can reevaluate, change their minds, change the way they respond to those messages, uphold a different message.
Am I saying there is no truth to be defended? Absolutely not.
There are non-negotiables: like the reality of sin and our adversary the devil, the need for Jesus Christ’s shed blood to secure our righteousness before God. And for those of us who accept these concepts as foundational, there isn’t any disagreement about them. And there are a great many points of theology which I will declare without apology. But some of it is negotiable, and it’s figuring out everything else and trying to live as fallen people that cause the problems.
There are issues for which divergent camps remain firmly convinced that the Bible holds up their view and never the twain shall meet. Cessationists vs. Pentecostals. Where women fit in church leadership. Predestination vs. free will.
Traditions construct rules where there are perhaps not actually any rules. Forgiveness is forgotten, or grace is overemphasized. Standards are established on prooftexts without accounting for the nature and character of God and other nuances as revealed in the whole of Scripture.
Leadership on all kinds of power trips wound people left and right, intentionally and otherwise. All too frequently, the victims are made to be the problem themselves.
Prompted by our internal wonderings and woundedness, each of us is trying to work out our salvation, even those who are drifting and rebelling. Whether we’re securely under the blood or not, each of us is just trying to get it right with the tools we have available.
But we are fallen. Our grasp of the things of God is limited by our flesh-battered capacity to stay in touch with the Holy Spirit.
I’m saying the questioning is our birthright, because as long as we’re on this plane, the fullness of our experience of God is an elusive goal.
How about this for some of those questions from which whole denominations have sprung: Maybe God didn’t spell it all out in the point by point in the Bible because He’s more interested in us learning to further the Kingdom side by side in spite of differences than He is in us drawing up the lines.
Why do we need lines? So we know how close we can get to them without sinning?
Why is that a good standard? Why are we not running away from that line toward the living God?
No, I know. There has to be a framework around which to arrange orderly corporate life in the body of Christ. But it’s easier to pass down a lot of rules than to sit down and talk things over with people. Hence the divisions are passed down through the centuries. I guess I have to ask if it’s a matter of someone’s eternal future. If it is, let’s figure it out. If it’s not, it seems like there’s some wiggle room. But of course, not everyone believes that way.
Why do we need there to be one right answer?
So we can know if we’re on the winning side? It’s important to believe we’re on the winning side.
Are you sure you’re in with God? If not—press in until you’re sure. Otherwise, there’s a lot to talk about and much more to do, and all that can be done with humility and grace, encouragement and bearing with one another. We can work toward the same goal, even if we reach a point where we have to decide to see certain things differently.
There’s a lot of healing to extend to those who have been wounded while asking questions in the house of God.
Maybe I’m wrong about some of this. I’ll keep in touch with God and maybe I’ll change my mind. I believe that He’ll get me there as long as I stay open to the possibility that I misunderstand.
Now to Him who is able to protect you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory, blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 24-25
A bent reed He will not break off and a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish. Isaiah 42:3
Toward the promise,
Lana
On guard
Meet Little Girl, aka Fuzzy Butt, Baby Cat, or Sugar Bones. This is how it is in the early mornings when I roll out of bed to write. She either trusts in ignorance or is just daring me. Stomped the end of her tail last week, but she didn’t seem to care. I’ve mostly learned to look around before I start moving.
I guess I’m glad she doesn’t insist on being ON the desk.
Through the Bible in a Year Reading Plan and Challenge
The thing that jumped out at me this week is how often God struck people dead for their sins—either communally or individually. It’s a bunch more times than I remember! I have the feeling I’m going to have to sit with this for a while, although it’s hard to imagine that it says anything other than how much God insists on holiness. Sobering.
But how are you doing? Is it getting heavy there in Numbers and Deuteronomy? The bits of story stashed in between the law and the genealogy are fascinating glimpses of just how intimately present God was in the unfolding of the redemption arc.
Keep digging for the nuggets!
Sunday, March 14 Catch up and reflect
Monday, March 15 Deuteronomy 5-7, Mark 12:1-27
Tuesday, March 16 Deuteronomy 8-10, Mark 12:28-44
Wednesday, March 17 Deuteronomy 11-13, Mark 13:1-13
Thursday, March 18 Deuteronomy 14-16, Mark 13:14-37
Friday, March 19 Deuteronomy 17-19, Mark 14:1-25
Saturday, March 20 Deuteronomy 20-25, Mark 14:26-72
Question for this week’s reading: What is Mark’s favorite adverb?
Here’s the link to last week’s issue What you keep that’s not a treasure
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