Can you repeat the question?

When I ran a puppet team at my local church, I used to ask my puppeteers what God has been doing in their lives. Ask me that question today, and I would answer with a smile, “Forty-two.”

For those who don’t know, in the Douglas Adams novel, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a super computer named Deep Thought is asked for the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything. Several million years later, Deep Thought gave the answer, “Forty-Two.”
Aghast, the creators of Deep Thought demanded, “What’s the question?”
Deep Thought didn’t know, and told them to build another computer to find out, and that computer turned out to be the planet Earth.

What has God been teaching me lately? He’s been teaching me that on this one point at least, Douglas Adams got it right.

As Christians, we have a book full of answers. I’ve even seen it condensed into bumper sticker format proudly proclaiming, “Jesus is the Answer!”

True. But what’s the question? Some Christians might consider this trivial, but don’t the questions give the answers meaning? What good is forty-two without, “What is six times seven?”

This was driven home for me a few weeks ago as I wrestled with issues of sexual abuse for a novel I’m planning to write entitled, “Burlesque.” After trying to wrap my head around the emotions, motivations, and issues of the various characters, I found myself exactly where I started—with the same hypothesis I had set out to prove or disprove, but forgotten about. I laughed at my own stupidity, for this particular journey nearly drove me mad. “God,” I said, “one of these days I’ll learn to simply trust the answers you give me.”

“This journey wasn’t about the answers,” He said in that gentle way of His. “It was about the questions.”

And what a powerful point that is! We can’t fully grasp the answer until we’ve grappled with the question, because only then, after testing those answers, can we fully embrace them and claim them as our own. Isn’t this what adolescent rebellion is all about? A challenging of the answers given to us by our parents? Even when they were right, we often need to discover these truths for ourselves.

Were I to assemble rules to live by, they would appear as follows and in this order of importance:
1. “Question Everything!”
2. “The Bible is absolutely true.”
3. “The best questions are spawned by the answers.”

Some Christians might argue that rule #2 should be rule #1, but I disagree. How can we know in our heart of hearts that the Bible is true unless we’re allowed to question it from time to time?

Am I suggesting we sin to test the scriptures? Not at all. Sin is dangerous, which is why God said to avoid it in the first place. Sinning the prove the Bible true is like drinking poison to prove it will kill you. It gets an “A” for effectiveness, but a definite “F” in the Thought Through category. Besides, aren’t there plenty of examples around us to prove that sex outside of marriage is a bad idea? Or that habitual liars lead messy and unnecessarily complicated lives?
I love watching movies like, “Saved!” and “Dogma” for the sole purpose of challenging my faith. Without this, how can I trust the scriptures to be true? Yes, at first we need to accept this by faith. But the more those questions prove the answers true, how much stronger will our faith be?

Let us not neglect rule #3. In “Saved!” for example, the characters asked, “Why would God make us all so different only to condemn us for it later?” It’s an excellent question, but it’s also fundamentally flawed. Part of those differences didn’t come from God’s creation, but from sin’s corruption. I’m not picking on gay’s here; we’ve all been affected by the Curse, and we’re all required to lay down an intimate part of our soul to walk with Jesus. Many in that movie needed to lay down their religious righteousness, which was just as intensely personal as a sexual orientation.

I know there came a point in my life when I had to do that.

What would the better question have been? Don’t know. But isn’t that part of the adventure? In adherence to rule #3, let’s begin with an answer. Someone far wiser than me once said, “Jesus loves us enough to accept us as we are, and too much to leave us there.”

I guess I look at it this way. To simply accept the answers and go no further is fine, if that's the way God wired you. Some people simply couldn't handle a Jesus who was anything more than a puring cat on their lap. The beauty of Jesus is that He'll met us where we are.

But discipleship--true discipleship as I understand it in the scriptures--means getting off the comfy couch of our save little cultured world and chasing a lion, knowing that lion will be molding us into His image; not the other way around. In grappling with the tough questions, we're grappling with Christ. This is the way we get to know Him. And what could possibly be cooler than that?