Questions

Life can be complicated ~ we all know this. The thing is, it seems to me, that we in the church seem to think we ought to have life figured out. We seem to think that when people come to the church, we ought to have concrete answers for them. We seem to think that we need to understand who G-d is, what G-d is up to in the world, and how we’re supposed to make ourselves connected to the incarnate divine. We who are leaders think we need to have gotten it all together before we show up in front of the congregation. Even worse, many members of our congregations feel like we can’t even show up for worship unless we’re dressed in our Sunday best and have a happy smile on our face.

Do we give ourselves permission, and do we give each other permission, to not have everything figured out? Do we give ourselves and each other permission to show up in the community if we’re not at our best? Do we allow ourselves to be hurting, to ask serious questions to which we don’t have preconceived answers, to wrestle with life’s uncertainties? Do we allow ourselves to express our confusion about G-d without feeling like we’ll be looked down on?

What if we worked toward doing serious bible study & discipleship, and what if when we did this bible study we intentionally didn’t allow answers? What if we embraced the questions, recognizing that G-d works in the uncertainty of the in-between places? What would that do for our life of community discipleship?

Maybe part of the trouble is that we are afraid to let go of what once was certain. For many people, our faith was certain at one point in our life. Of course, life itself was less complicated when we were children. And then for many, our faith didn't grow as we grew, and now we're faced with uncertainty about the uncertainty we experience in our faith, and we're afraid to let our certainty die. But if we truly believe that G-d makes all things new, why are we afraid to let go of what is old and needs to die?

And what if we believed that we don't need to search for G-d, because G-d has already found us.