Pull Up A Chair, Ask Me Anything

In Sunday’s post, I imagined young Jesus in the Temple, twelve years old, staying behind to ask questions, and every adult around him delighted instead of alarmed. And it made me look hard at how I handled questions for most of my life, which was, I realized, exactly backwards.

Here is what I mean. For most of my life, the answer came first. The church had it, or the preacher had it, or the tradition had it, and it was handed to me already finished. So if I had a question, I didn’t really wrestle with it. I accepted the answer that had already been given, and then I opened the Bible to find the verses that confirmed it.

That is also how I wrote my Bible studies. I started with the answer, and then I went looking for the scripture that backed it up. For decades, that was my whole relationship with questions and answers. Answer first. Evidence second.

There is a real problem with that approach, and it took me years to let myself see it. The Bi…