Knowing the Answer Isn't the Issue

By Jonathan Ho

In “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” a comedic science fiction series, there’s a supercomputer built to uncover the “answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.” The computer computes the answer, but the answer only brings more confusion because no one knows what the question is.

I believe many generations of Christians seek to bring the “answer” of Jesus to the world. We want to think that it’s a simple solution: to present the gospel, trust the Holy Spirit, and then depending on the people, they will either come to believe or not. We like to think it's as simple as just adding water.

The problem is the world isn’t that simple. The world is complex, and often our answers don’t appear to be sufficient. According to many if not most Christians, we have all the answers—we have God’s revealed truth in the Bible and we have the Holy Spirit. Still, why is it so hard to understand all the brokenness and evil in the world?

With so many unanswered questions, many of my friends struggle to commit their hearts to a God who they feel they cannot trust. As one of my good friends once emailed me,

“I feel that if I really wanted to I could be a "good Christian" and convince/train myself that God/Jesus is real and just blindly follow him. I really think I could do this if I wanted to. But one of the main attributes that I like about myself is that I am not fake, and therefore I choose not to put on a facade that I love Jesus Christ. I do not feel the Holy Spirit and I don't think I ever have.”

My heart breaks for these friends because often they’ve been presented with a God who lives apart from their experiences. When people question commonly held belief systems, they're often shunned or attacked, but I believe we should be careful about dismissing others; while truth should be true regardless of what we feel, we still need to take into account what people have experienced in life.

If our interpretations do not match life, we shouldn't assume life is wrong, but be willing to examine our interpretations and assumptions. And yet, many of my friends have been told to not ask questions and to “just believe,” or they have been pushed to become something their hearts reject. They are told or tell themselves what they think a Christian should look like and struggle when they don’t match up with that image.

I want to show you the struggles many of my friends and I have faced and the reactions we have received from the Christians around us. I want to tell you stories about the Christianity we have experienced.
I'll start with myself. My sole motivation for going to college was to see people come to know Jesus. I went to college wanting to see “revival,” but in the end, I had more questions than answers.

I went on campus wanting to see miracles and signs, to see people become Christians, to see many pray the all-important prayer, the sinner’s prayer. I made sure to memorize all the verses in the Roman Road (a technique to share the gospel), and I often imagined walking up to a blind student, praying for her, and seeing her blind eyes open. I supposed that all the students would see this and come forward wanting to believe in Jesus. I figured, one miracle and presto! Everyone will believe!

But that never happened.

For a stretch I prayed for a lot of people who were sick. I remember praying for a sick friend at a winter retreat. He remained sick. I once prayed for a friend who had a terrible migraine during a sermon. His head felt better, but only when the speaker finished his talk. I remember praying really, really hard for a boy with twisted legs. We even laid hands on him. Nothing happened. I remember praying for a girl with cancer. Her parents were there as my dad and I prayed for her. She passed away a few years later.

Why wouldn’t God fix everything? All he had to do was one tiny miracle and many could come to believe, and yet, he didn't. Did I lack faith? At the same time, I slowly became disillusioned as college went on. I stopped feeling the fire I had felt in high school and my first years in college. I began to wonder what the point of being a Christian was. Was it only to convert people? I ended up sharing the gospel with many but felt empty and confused about what life was all about.

When our beliefs about God don’t appear to match up with what we see, we start asking questions. Sometimes we ask, "Is God trustworthy?" True relationship requires trust, and when someone you trust suddenly seems untrustworthy (including God), you come to a crossroads. You can wrestle with what you see or you can choose to let the relationship go.

This happened to a good friend of mine. He is an MK, a “missionary kid.” Growing up, he wanted to serve God and glorify him with his life, but then he started to have doubts. He puts it this way: “I began having questions regarding certain tenets of Christianity which I could not find satisfactory answers to. The more I looked into the problems, the more difficult I found in reconciling truth with Christian truths. Though my mind was experiencing more and more cognitive dissonance, my heart and desire was that Christianity be true, as it was all I had known. In the end, I knew if Christianity was indeed untrue, I could not pretend it wasn't so. Thus, I left Christianity.”

When he told his parents he no longer believed, they didn’t take it too well. Sometime after that conversation, he mentioned planning a trip to visit his grandparents. His parents told him, “That’s good, but remember, you can’t love without God.”

For my friend, his genuine concerns were seen as unbelief, and he became labeled as an “unbeliever,” someone incapable of love.

A lack of love was pivotal in another friend, a close friend, leaving the faith. One of the most painful times in my life was when he “de-converted” after college. He stopped believing in God. He actually called me beforehand and asked me to read a book questioning whether the Bible was accurate or not. I remember thinking, "Why would I purposefully question my beliefs? I don’t have time to read these books. I’m too busy trying to love others." Funny, right? I was too busy loving others to love my friend and listen. I later found out that his de-conversion story describes this very phone conversation and his decision to stop believing in God that very night.

Rather than seeking to understand, I was too busy to address his needs.

We often think being a Christian is the point of Christianity. If you’re a Christian you’re “in,” and if you’re not then you’re “out.” Being “in” means you're safe and being “out” means you’re bad. But is what you call yourself what really matters? Not according to Jesus' parable about the Good Samaritan.

Here’s a modified version: It’s Saturday morning, and someone is questioning his faith. He’s a student and likely going to lose his scholarship due to bad grades. Everything around him seems to be falling apart. He calls his pastor saying, “I just don’t think I can believe.” His pastor forwards him some articles and some book suggestions by people like Lee Strobel and Josh McDowell and says he will pray for him. Still feeling disconnected, this young man calls his Christian friend and asks him to try to understand where he’s coming from. His friend replies by saying, "I don’t think it’s healthy to question my faith and honestly, I’m just too busy." Not knowing where to go, this man searches the internet for someone who will listen, someone who will care. He ends up finding ex-Christians who listen, encourage, and care for him.

That is pretty much what happened to my close friend. And I am one of the people who walked right by him.
Jesus followed his parable by asking, “Who was the neighbor to the man who was beaten?” Similarly, I would like to ask, “Who was the neighbor to the man who was suffering?”

What if the question isn’t how we identify ourselves but where our hearts are and what we do? What if Jesus isn’t here to do things our way, on our schedules, and for our comfort? What if in seeking to follow God we have in actuality sought to make God in our own image? What if in seeking to be good Christians we ended up forgetting how to love our neighbor? What if answers take time? What if people can’t be fixed but only nurtured?

I want to conclude with one more story. I have a friend who was involved in college ministry. He was in the leadership team and didn’t fit the mold of a typical Christian student. In attempting to experience different things, he researched some recreational drugs and decided to try out some drugs which research showed were non-addictive and non-harmful. He ended up telling another student leader about this. His friend ended up telling the leadership team, and without talking to him, they started meeting secretly and stopped involving him in meetings. Instead of talking to him, they ignored him.

During that summer, he ended up without a place to live. As he related to me later, “for all they knew, I was on drugs and homeless and they were more worried about keeping their theology clean than loving me.”

I wonder if sometimes we are like the priest and Levite in the story of the Good Samaritan, seeking to stay clean and walking along the other side of the road. We fear the mess and inconvenience. Perhaps rather than wrestle through the difficult conversations and seek to understand and love, we have sought quick fixes, easy solutions, and easy answers.

In the Bible we read, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). God is love and he is much, much bigger than us and our expectations. What if we gave up seeking to turn people into what we want them to be and started to love them as Christ loved us? What if we gave up trying to be right, and instead of asking, “Are you a Christian?” asked, “How can I be a good neighbor?” When we ask that question, instead of focusing on results, labels, or beliefs, we focus on loving others by faith, trusting it is only God who can change a heart. After all, it isn’t our job to change hearts, but it is our job to be faithful in following Jesus.