A common theme in my writing is “living in the tension.” This is especially true in Junkyard Wisdom Rebuilt, which focuses on how we need to wrestle with faith, hope, justice, love, and wealth.
We love finding answers to vexing problems because it makes life simpler and easier to understand. That’s a good thing, obviously. But we can compromise on the answers because we are so desperate for them. We fall into groupthink, or tradition, or ease of understanding. We fail to wrestle with the tensions that are in all vexing problems.
Perhaps there are some things we should just accept as unanswerable. The most obvious example might be God’s love. Really, it makes no sense. Why does God love so much? Why does God offer grace? Why does God put up with us?
Life might be far more interesting, and certainly more fulfilling, if we intentionally live in the tension of questions like these. I suspect God meets us in the midst of wrestling with difficult questions.
Below is a quote I came across years ago from Austrian poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. Hopefully you find it as encouraging and insightful as I have.
“Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”