InterVarsity Press

Conversations: More Questions Than Answers

Lucas:

I have reached a point where I have more questions than answers about Christianity. I became a Christian when I was 14, but 15 years later, I sometimes feel like telling God to just go away.

Even though I started out with a strong desire to follow Christ and a real burning to live my beliefs, I've begun wondering whether I didn't just do these things in order to gain the acceptance of my peers, the people who loved and accepted me at church because of my decision.

At 29, life has become difficult, and it seems rare that God answers prayers any more. There seem to be more disappointments than help, and all the answers offered by Christianity have turned into vague platitudes that neither help nor satisfy. Rather than learning to have faith in God, his lack of help is teaching me to have faith that he won't help in the future anyway.

Perhaps worst of all, I'm married to a wonderful Christian woman whom I truly love and find to be my perfect match in a lot of ways. Because of my questioning my faith, she is left bound to an unequal yoke.

Can you help?

Ruth:

Your letter speaks to so many issues and struggles, and you must have known in writing it that it was a therapeutic exercise as much as it was an expectation of help.

I tend to offer more questions than answers—though I know most of those who write to me are looking for answers. In fact, you seem to lament in your first sentence that you have more questions than answers. I would not view that as a negative factor in your life. One of my favorite writes is Parker Palmer, and the following material comes from his book The Courage to Teach. I think what he says applies to your situation:

In one exchange [in Letters to a Young Poet], the young poet presses the older one with question after urgent question, and [Rainer Maria] Rilke replies with this counsel: "Be patient toward all this that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. . . . Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. . . .";

The hope Rilke gives me lies partly in his notion that on "some distant day" I might find that I have lived my way into a more confident understanding of how to hold the tension of paradox than I have at this moment. . . .

But my deeper hope comes with Rilke's words "and the point is to live everything." Of course that is the point! If I do not fully live the tensions that come my way, those tensions do not disappear: they go underground and multiply. I may not know how to solve them, but by wrapping my life around them and trying to live out their resolution, I open myself to new possibilities and keep the tensions from tearing me apart.

There is only one alternative: an unlived life. . . . [85-86]

I take Palmer very seriously and I have come to love the questions and tensions of life—as painful as they sometimes are. I'm wondering if you have shared your struggles with your wife. Perhaps you have, and perhaps she cannot understand. I find that to be true with so many Christians I encounter. They simply cannot fathom how someone who has been so long in the faith as I have been can experience so many doubts and struggle with unbelief. On the contrary, my biggest perplexity in life is how it is that so many Christians never struggle with the big questions of life.

I just finished reading a book, My God and I: A Spiritual Memoir by Lewis Smedes. He died suddenly right after the memoir was written, and he is remembered as a great saint of God. Yet, he writes of the very matters you mention. He writes about prayer and admits that "even my grown-up prayers are a mystery to me. I pray a lot, but never for long stretches at a time; I am just not able to concentrate on God for more than ten minutes. . . . Still, when it comes down to brass tacks, my prayers do not seem to make much difference to people I pray for. When I pray that God will heal people with a terminal illness, they nevertheless die. . . . When I pray for people who are given a fighting chance, some of them get better, most of them die. And if they do get better, I have no way of knowing whether they would have gotten better had nobody prayed for them." (p. 29) What I like so much about Smedes is that he's honest. He did not deny the faith; rather he lived out the tensions. At the very end of the book he reflects back on his good life and on gratitude—again with honesty and tension.

But, then, when I thank God for being so very generous to me, I seem to imply that he must be a stingy crank to many others. When I remember that a thousand times ten thousands are living out a thousand varieties of hell on earth, my joy feels self-centered and obscene to me. This is why, on my little island of blessing in this vast ocean of pain, my "thank-you" always has the blues. (p. 170)

I would encourage you to read Smedes memoir—and to allow your own memoir and a questioning Christian to flow from that. Peace.