Living the questions
with the thing in your hand
So much of the past few months have felt like wrestling to me. Not because of some sudden circumstance or a specific stressor, though the world continues to rage on, and I continue to shift and trim the edges on my own life. No, this is an interior unsettledness, wrestling through my own weariness and wonderings, impatience and apathy in the face of many unanswered questions. The grappling continues in slow motion; answers feel elusive. Like Jacob I am wrestling through the watches of the night. I imagine him gritting his teeth, bracing through weariness, ugly gripping and quivering with exhaustion, responding instinctively as sudden weight shifts change the game entirely, and yet not at all— the wrestling continues. Unlike Jacob, I wonder am I’m wrestling God or myself? What would settledness or answers even look like?
In the fog of uncertainty, Rilke reminds me “to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves…. Live the questions. Perhaps you will then gradually… live along some distant day into the answer.”1 Maybe it is the clarity I lack that is most illuminating. Maybe there is a broader wisdom to Henri Nouwen’s metaphor that “Writing about the spiritual life is like making prints from negatives.”2 Maybe his words apply not just to the writing of the spiritual life, but also the living of it. I remember decoding negative images on film strips in my childhood, squinting at tiny sepia rectangles, discerning faces by shape, and the presence of color by its strange absence. Decades later, I’m squinting into the filmy uncertainties around me and the negatives imprinted within my own heart, still working out answers from the inside out.
It is in seasons of uncertainty that I consistently find comfort in the narratives of the Old Testament. Something about the failures, the doubts, the insane relational dynamics, and the surprising mercy of God all make space for my own lostness and subsequent relief. As I look back on the history of God’s people, I simultaneously look back on the times where I have sensed God’s nearness, remembering certain seasons where his palpable presence enveloped me, certain moments where divine revelations viscerally shocked me. I know without a doubt that God is real, but in the present wilderness I wrestle with my own apathy, aimlessness, and my own perception of his absence.
It is a comfort when Nouwen describes the moment when Christ on the cross cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” as the moment when
“total aloneness and full acceptance touched each other…. When God’s absence was most loudly expressed, his presence was most profoundly revealed. When God himself in his humanity became part of our most painful experience of God’s absence, he became most present to us.”3
Paradoxically, my perception of his absence may be the actual window, the negative image leading into intimacy, vulnerability, and a presence that is closer than my own breath.
While reading in Exodus recently, I found myself mesmerized by the burning bush account in chapters 3 and 4. God appeared to Moses—an old man exiled from the land of his youth, a shepherd working quietly in the wilderness—and commissioned him to go back to Egypt to free his kinsmen from slavery. I know this story; I’ve heard it a million times. Yet as familiarity often speeds up my pace, this time I chose deliberately to slow down.
God affirmed to Moses that he would be with him, answering questions and doubts with a promise, a refrain: “I will be with you.”4 Yet even after the dialogue of chapter three, Moses’ doubts continued to audibly simmer: “What if they won’t believe me and will not obey me but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you’?”5 The age-old question behind Moses’ question feels familiar: “Will you really be with me, or will you forsake me when I need you most??”
Reading the narrative with fresh eyes, it was God’s answer to this third question that stopped me in my tracks: “The Lord asked [Moses], ‘What is that in your hand?’”6 Though God’s later questions to Moses were rhetorical, this one was not. Belabored doubts were not met with exasperation, but taken seriously with patience, kindness, and wisdom. In Scripture, when God asks a question it is not for his own information, but serves as an invitation for the hearer. He answered Moses’ question with a question, beckoning this beloved doubter into deeper participation and partnership with the divine.
“The Lord asked him, ‘What is that in your hand?’ ‘A staff,’ he replied.”7
The thing Moses wielded for decades before coming face to face with the Almighty became the instrument consecrated as a sign of his presence. The tool that Moses mastered became the symbol of God’s mastery over his servant. The invitation into divine partnership is strange and terrifying, yet also dignifying and humanizing as the ordinary becomes wild and sacred and potent. From that point on, the staff Moses carried would be referred to as “God’s staff:” it no longer belonged to him.8 He was invited to move “from illusion to prayer… from false certainty to true uncertainties, from an easy support system to a risky surrender, from the many ‘safe’ gods to the God whose love has no limits.”9
How often I assume God needs me to wrap up my questions before I come to him, or to master something new, or to prove some supernatural proficiency before he will use me. How often I assume the things that are closest to me are the least important and the least capable of being used by God. But the question remains: “What is that in your hand?” What are the questions, the tools, the laundry, the pen, the other persons’ hand, the weeds and the seeds that you are already holding? What are the doubts or skills or total lack of capacity that are already in your possession? Maybe those are the things God is asking for. Maybe those are the negatives by which he will reveal his most tender presence. Maybe those are the questions most ripe for living.
From “Letters to a Young Poet,” by Rainer Maria Rilke
From “Reaching Out,” by Henri J.M. Nouwen
From “Reaching Out,” by Henri J.M. Nouwen
Exodus 3:12
Exodus 4:1 CSB
Exodus 4:2a CSB
Exodus 4:2 CSB
Exodus 4:20
From “Reaching Out,” by Henri J.M. Nouwen