Leaving Certainty, Loving Questions
Written by Eau Claire author, Jason Kanz
“Here’s one of my favorite pictures that I’ve taken. I love how the bee appears to be looking around the flower pedal, almost hiding, curious.” - Jason
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
- Rainer Maria Rilke
I was the answer guy.
I felt proud when people would ask me questions about the Bible or religion. I became a church leader and lay pastor. I preached often, counseled people, and led a number of small groups. I spent most of my free time studying and pursuing training in Christian apologetics, theology, and Christian worldview.
I read more than 100 books every year and nearly all of them were about Christianity. I knew I had the right answers. Even though I never said so aloud, I enjoyed gently correcting people I was certain were wrong.
In 2018, my well-constructed tower came crashing down.
I was increasingly exhausted with my unpaid pastoral duties and my paid job. I was becoming more depressed and irritable and it was taking its toll on my family. I felt attacked on several fronts.
My brave daughter confronted me with what I have come to know as the “28 ways you suck as a father” letter. In it, she pointed out that I valued ministry more than my family and that she didn’t like being home when I was there. Her words gutted me. I was seeing more and more people raising the alarms about spiritual abuse around the country and I was stirred.
In January 2018, one of the most revered pastors in our denomination was credibly accused of sexual misconduct several years prior. I listened to a group of pastors malign the character of his victim and my head spun even faster. I won’t go into all the details, but my wife and I both knew it was time to get out.
A shift for me through that process is that I was becoming more of a question guy than an answer guy. For a long time, I found it helpful to ask questions in order to facilitate conversation.
One of the most significant questions I began to ask was, “Is it possible I’m wrong?”
I had been operating on the assumption that I was typically right about most things related to God—I had a large library and several earned certificates as tokens of my accumulated knowledge. But what if…
One of the scariest things in the world is to sincerely ask ourselves if it is possible we are wrong. What if I was wrong about women’s roles in the church? What if I was wrong about Calvinism? What if I was wrong about LGBTQ issues? What if I was wrong about atonement and hell and inerrancy?
What if the church could be harmful?
What if my behaviors as a Christian were harmful or even abusive?
If I was wrong about these things, what would they say about me as a human?
For a long time, I lived in a fog of confusion about my identity. I didn’t know what to think about God or the church or spirituality. Was I an evangelical? Was I even a Christian? Did it matter?
These days, the answers matter less to me than they once did.
Echoing Rilke, I am learning to “love the questions themselves.” I want to live with curiosity and humility, aware of the beauty of diversity and the freedom of uncertainty. It is not in the rigid constraint of answers, but in the open space of uncertainty where I am coming home to myself.
