Monday, May 24, 2010

what if...

... we could live the questions of our lives confident of the answer that we need to live into the questions.

"Are you still searching for your calling? Are you still wrestling with your purpose on this earth? Our calling is to please Him--to wake up every morning saying, "Yes, Lord," then live through the day to discover His questions." (Beth Moore, Living Beyond Yourself)

Remember, God is LOVE, and He is only and always good. His Spirit is the evidence of His "Yes".

"Whatever God has promised gets stamped with the Yes of Jesus. In him, this is what we preach and pray, the great Amen, God's Yes and our Yes together, gloriously evident. God affirms us, making us a sure thing in Christ, putting his Yes within us. By his Spirit he has stamped us with his eternal pledge—a sure beginning of what he is destined to complete." 2 Corinthians 1:19-21 (in Context)

Thursday, May 20, 2010

living the questions

I love having deep & deliberate conversations around faith, spirituality, life, and matters of the heart. So it's no surprise that I've sought out opportunities (and that I've been invited) to engage with folks on that level.


For one such engagement, one co-inspirer of the group shared this with us to spark a very fruitful discussion:

When we were together last, I mentioned this quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet:


I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.


My suggestion is that, to frame our time together, we think/talk about the questions we are “living”—those “unresolved” matters that keep us searching, even if the answers are elusive. My experience is that “living the questions” yields something better than answers; it stretches our capacity for wonder and mystery.


So what is/are the question(s) that you are living out in your life?