About 10 years ago, my wife and I bought a hundred-year-old house. We were really excited because it pretty much had everything we wanted in a big old house – a nice front porch, a big entryway with a beautiful staircase up to the second floor, great original woodwork that hadn’t been painted.
The one thing it didn’t have was a fireplace.
Now this wasn’t a deal breaker for us, but we also didn’t have the foresight to consider the angst it would cause one day with our kids who were concerned about how Santa would get into our house.
Fortunately, we dodged this sticky issue by spending almost every Christmas at my parents’ place where there is a fireplace.
Still, there were other questions. How can Santa make it across the globe in one night and what if we ever spend Christmas at our own house and what about other people who don’t have fireplaces and do naughty kids really get coal?
We didn’t go to extremes to uphold the Santa myth, but at the same time, we wanted our kids to be kids. Often times, we’d answer their questions with “What do you think?” because we wanted our kids to think for themselves. And they did.
But there came a point when the answers stopped making sense as the kids got older and savvier and as they engaged things at a deeper level.
It’s ironically similar to the relationship I’ve had with questions throughout my Christian life. I’ve spent most of the years certain I’ve had the right answers to the most important questions.
But like with Santa, there came a time when the answers no longer satisfied the questions.
Just like my son watching the online Christmas Eve Santa tracker and knowing that something doesn’t add up, I couldn’t continue to embrace the same answers simply because they were the ones I’d always known and the ones everyone around me continued to insist on.
So I shifted from asking questions to questioning the answers, and as my foundation started to get shaken, I noticed something strange. We say that God can handle our questions and that questions are perfectly acceptable, perhaps even good – but there seems to be an unspoken condition: as long as we come up with the right answers.
The answers that our denomination, our church, our statement of belief, our creeds, our minister, our youth pastor, our faith tradition… adhere to.
But what if there’s a reason that deep inside of us those answers no longer satisfy the questions?
Maybe it’s right to question the answers.
Maybe having the right answers was never actually the point…
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