Without disruptions in life, where would we be?
—Sarah Gadon
I couldn’t pray, I couldn’t worship.
I couldn’t sit through another Bible study where another person’s pain or joy was met with responses right out of the religious section of a greeting-card display.
“God has everything in control.”
“When God closes a door, he opens a window.”
“God took your loved one because he needed another angel.”
I just couldn’t do it. My own questions and doubts had brought me to a place where I could no longer go through the motions. I hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to trust God as I watched my dad take his last breath my senior year of high school. I didn’t realize how hard it would be to encounter so many new ideas and perspectives when I went off to college. I couldn’t believe that I was only in my twenties and already facing chronic pain from sports injuries and unexplained headaches. I was filled with questions that overwhelmed me on a daily basis:
How do I pray to a God who seems distant?
What do the ancient stories in the Bible have to do with my life today?
How do I deal with the reality that my beliefs have shifted?
What do I do about no longer feeling at home in the faith community I was raised in?
Why do politics seem to dictate the expressions of faith I see around me?
What does God think of my friends who are good people but don’t follow Jesus?
How can I be a part of a group that has so many people who seem to do the opposite of what Jesus stood for but still do it in his name?
How do I trust a Being who allows hatred, violence, and injustice to exist in our world?
How do I process the anger I have toward what I see happening in the world?
What do I do about the contempt I am beginning to feel for other Christians who seem to not care for the poor or about racism or the marginalized? Were they reading the same Bible I felt obligated to read most of my life?
What if the God I thought I believed in doesn’t exist at all?
I was stuck. The questions I had, and the inability of my community to hold them, made me feel like I was standing in quicksand up to my waist.
This is the story of how I managed to get free from the quicksand, one inch at a time. How I stopped looking at questions and doubts as holding me back, and how I stepped into a life where questions led to new experiences and discoveries. This is the story about how I reclaimed curiosity and chose a life of passionate uncertainty. About how I began to embrace questions and doubts—and how it saved my faith.
I emerged from the quicksand with a deeper understanding of myself and those around me. I learned more than I ever thought I could about life and the pursuit of meaning and purpose. I was set free to live into a more vibrant understanding of God and what it means to be a person who truly follows Jesus. This is the story of how I decided to stay curious and why I’ll never go back to a life without questions.
This isn’t just my story, this is our story. We are created to be curious—to wonder, to discover, to question, and yes, to doubt. Curiosity is a key part of what it means to be human. We have the cognitive ability to think beyond our immediate surroundings. It’s what separates us from the other mammals on the planet. We each get to choose whether to embrace curiosity or ignore and suppress it.
For many of us who grew up in religious environments, our surroundings have thrust us toward the latter. The curiosity we were born with, and engaged with easily in our childhood, is snuffed out by the expectations placed upon us as we come of age. As we step into the constructs formed by the cultures around us, our curiosity is squelched.
As a Christian growing up in the church in North America, I’ve noticed that these constructs are impressed upon us at an early age. My childhood experience with church culture was highly structured, and I was encouraged to memorize answers, not ask questions. The adults in my life shared with me their understanding of what it meant to be a Jesus follower—and I know they meant well. But as I entered adulthood, the suppression of my inquisitiveness had taken a significant toll on my ability to ask questions about God, faith, and the church. I had been stripped of my curiosity.
Perhaps you feel like you are wandering, confused by what seems like a wilderness—like you are stuck in the same quicksand I was. You might feel like the faith system you’d come to trust is now more like a fortress trapping you inside. Maybe you’re reading this, and the first thing you notice is the lack of questions you have about your faith. Curiosity and wonder could bring a new and meaningful dynamic to your life of faith. It may mean the important decision to choose curiosity over comfort.
It is time for all of us to embrace curiosity and disrupt the status quo. Disruption often has negative connotations—someone disrupted a meeting, or the Wi-Fi is out and it disrupted our screen time. However, disruption has significant benefits. Without disruption in the transportation industry, we’d only have horse-drawn carriages. Without disruption to the communication and technology world, we’d still be rewinding answering machines and video tapes from Blockbuster. Sometimes, we must choose to let our life be disrupted, or we will never grow or be set free.
I sat down to coffee with a friend and mentor of mine recently. Rod is one of my curiosity heroes. He asks questions with such passion and integrity that I envy the words as soon as they come out of his mouth. His favorite questions to ask usually start with “Help me understand . . .” and then he expresses something he’s noticed about my life or actions. Rod’s incredible ability to understand people has helped me discover new things about myself.
“How did you become such a curious person?” I asked him. He explained that he had a lot to overcome before he was able to live a life of curiosity.
“I grew up in a home in the Bible Belt. The motto in our family was ‘we believe in believing’ and that was that,” Rod told me. But, even as a child, he sensed there had to be something more, so he pushed through the environment of well-meaning pastor types and dug deeper into the inquiries rather than running from them.
In many ways, I was just like Rod as a child. It never went well when someone gave me an instruction. I would ask why I had to follow along, and they would say
Because I said so.
That’s just the way it is.
You’ll understand when you’re older.
It’s okay if it doesn’t make sense; just have a little more faith.
As a little girl growing up in the church, these phrases bounced off me like the twenty-five-cent super-bouncy balls I’d beg my mom to buy me at the mall. The statements rang with dissonance, and I saw right through their flimsy logic. I have always had questions. Even as a child, I was never one to accept a basic answer or a simplified rebuttal. I was that kid always asking, “why?”
It seemed like the adults around me couldn’t handle what my young mind was processing. They hoped a felt-board story line or a cheesy VeggieTales movie would help me move along in my understanding of God. When a cucumber and a tomato are explaining the deepest questions of faith, you can see where the mystery of the God of the universe may get lost along the way.
Now as an adult, I understand the deep annoyance caused by my constant questioning. Like the drip of a leaky faucet, “why?” seems fine at first, but as it keeps going, you reach a point where you swear you will lose your mind if you hear it once more. Now I sometimes wish for some animated fruits or vegetables to provide some answers every once in a while so I can take a break! But my nephew is in that phase right now, and when he asks “why?” I often respond, “that is a really good question buddy.” Then we work together to find out, usually with the help of Google or Siri on my iPhone. It’s in those moments I wonder what we miss out on by squelching the curiosity of the kids in our lives.
Most kids grow out of their questioning. They begin to feel as though the answers the world offers will suffice. They begin to trust those who “say so”—those with titles, experience, and research.
Still others, not satisfied with the pat answers offered by their environment, search for more. Many come up empty, finding only a vague void after the answers of those who “say so” fall short. They begin to wander with a growing sense they’ve lost their way.
Like most people, I grew out of my nagging obsession with asking “why.” I’m disturbed by how I also seemed to grow out of the ability to truly be curious. Perhaps it wasn’t so much that I grew out of it, but my surroundings suggested that I should. I should receive the answers given to me and step forward without snagging the fabric of my community by asking more questions, thus pulling on a thread that might cause the tapestry created for me to unravel. I have memories of being asked to stay back after Sunday school and being told I should stay quiet and not ask so many questions because they were disrupting the class. I wasn’t the kind of kid who brushed it off when I got in trouble; I really wanted to please the adults around me. This all fueled the fear I had that questions were somehow wrong, inappropriate, or maybe even dangerous.
Should is a powerful word. It suggests expectations that we put on ourselves or that are put on us by others. When we should on ourselves, or let others should on us, nothing good results. It’s usually a mess.
I have been able to reclaim curiosity one question at a time. Questions that had plagued me became the chisel that chipped away at the brick tower of truths that I thought my life should be built upon.
Curiosity didn’t kill me; it rescued me.
But fear of asking too many questions nearly held me back, keeping me captive to the purposeless fortress that had been built around my life. It can be especially pronounced in the church and among followers of Jesus. Nearly every question seems to be met with a reflexive answer before the question has even been fully formed. It’s a carefully constructed catechism, ready at the tip of the tongue to squelch the curiosity, and potential doubt, of the questioner.
It’s as though the most important quest of the Jesus follower is to have a succinct response to all of life’s questions. This seems like an interesting goal for a group of people who follow a man who rarely had a simple or concise response when questions were asked of him.
It’s not that people didn’t bring their questions to Jesus; it’s just that his typical response to questioners was to offer an additional question. Other times he just told mysterious and often scandalous stories. I can’t understand why those who bear the name of Christ prefer fixed precepts rather than the bewildering stories Jesus so clearly preferred.
There is another way. A deeper way. An even more exciting way to live!
Jesus’s life offers some invitations to ask questions that can change our lives—maybe even questions that could change the world.
In this book we will wonder together. Questions, and even doubts, can push us deeper into a faith we can actually trust in rather than further from a God we think we can contain. We will explore the obstacles that might keep us from stepping into curiosity. Finally, I will urge you to choose to reclaim curiosity in your life and take the steps to get there.
Together we can explore the idea that, perhaps, not all who wonder are lost.