Wrestling With God — Thursday
Luke 22:44
He prayed more fervently, and he was in such agony of spirit that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood. (NLT)
Doesn’t much of our wrestling with God come down to questions? For Jesus, it’s asking if His Father would be willing to take the cup of suffering from Him. For us, it might be questions that are easily articulated, or those questions that burn wordlessly in our hearts. Impressions and assumptions about God and His intentions toward us. The questions, with or without words, whose answers—or lack thereof—leave us in a place of woundedness or stuckness.
C.S. Lewis posed this question: “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable?” What do you think? When you think of the lack of answers in your situation, is it that He’s just not gotten around to His email and sent a reply? Or that there is no answer? Or is it the dreadful place where we are convinced God has just plain said “No” out of hand and there’s no use asking anymore? You may have heard it said that God answers every prayer. Yes, no, or wait. But Lewis suggests another possibility: “All nonsense questions are unanswerable.”
That doesn’t mean our asking is insignificant or petty or wrong. It means it is entirely possible for us to end up running in circles, banging our head against the wall, ending up with no answer or the wrong answers because we begin with the wrong questions. It can be so subtle, making it easy to run a good way down the road with an entirely wrong question. It takes good questions to get good, insightful, helpful answers. And more importantly, it takes the right questions to get the right answers. And that means so much in the middle of a wrestling match with God… whether it’s our faith that’s at stake or otherwise.
When I was in college, I was asked to wrestle down this question and write a paper on it: “What similarities are there between the creation myths of the Bible and the creation myths of other faiths?” I ended up getting an “A” on a paper filled with untruth and illogical conclusions. I poured out wrong answers on the page because the question was the wrong starting point. It’s important that we make sure our questions are not shaded with our own opinions, our preferred conclusion, or misinformation before we even start looking for answers. We need to be both honest AND careful in our questioning to ensure we are not trying to produce the answer we want to hear, but that we get the right answers by asking the right questions.
Thursday’s Reflection
Where might your prayers, cries, and questions to God be leaving you stumped because of assumptions or conclusions that don’t leave God room to respond? Talk about those things with a trusted friend this week.
