Unanswered Questions

Holy Week is this week. I find my body tensing up as we make our way through Palm Sunday. I snap at my husband, he snaps back. We sigh, go for a walk, then begin to remind one another that this week is hard. It is a tough week for us, but we want to ease into it. We want to give ourselves grace for the grief we still feel years later.

Many of you might know, but we lost our close friend and co-worker Dani on Easter Saturday some years ago. It was and continues to be one of the hardest things I have ever had to process. Young death is hard. Young death with someone who was doing seemingly good, sacrificial work in Haiti is hard. Honestly, just… death is hard to begin with and I personally don’t feel like I have ever been equipped to walk through such a grief as losing a close friend. Our culture is full of go, go, go… produce, produce. What happens when we slow down to purposefully and intentionally sit with pain? It’s terrible. It’s countercultural.

The day Dani died and the months following made me examine my own life and beliefs more closely. When I met Dani I considered myself a missionary, someone who had been sent to spread the love of Christ to others in Haiti. I was always a bit uncomfy with the title, but as I grew in that “job,” I also grew in the amount of people who suddenly trusted my commentary on… everything. Culture, beliefs, who God was. It was a dangerous place for me to be in many ways, suddenly having all the answers. It was fun, but I also was able to reduce people’s issues and sufferings into neat little quips, holding ancient stories up against my own Western, modern worldview and telling others how to interpret it.

That is, until Dani passed away.

It was not immediately clear to me why her passing made me so uncomfortable in my own body, in my own home, in my own life. But, I found myself constantly searching to get out and away from my own skin. Ever felt like that, like your own bones are something to be feared? Like you could just scratch your skin off and not be far enough away from yourself? That was how I felt. Each passing day, I cried out to the God I thought I knew and finally it came “I didn’t think you would DO this.”

No, I truly didn’t know that I had hidden away a huge theological belief: I believed that I understood how God worked, truly. Like a mathematical equation, I saw injustice as a result of sin or brokenness or something else broad and judgmental I could tell myself to assuage my questions. Often I did this out of survival; I did live in Haiti, seeing a multitude of unjust and unfair living situations and stories made me callus and develop my own sort of theology around suffering.

Theology, the things we believe about the world and God, does not just come to those who study it. What we believe informs the way all of us act, and I had developed such a structure that told me that if I was doing something good that God would spare my life. If others were doing good, He would spare theirs. In fact, I had seen Him do it for me- in the middle of a clinic in rural Haiti. So, Dani’s death became even more complex for me. It became about the things I know.

I didn’t sleep for months after Dani passed. It was a true crisis of faith without even knowing I’d held such beliefs so closely.

Holy Week is a time in the church’s calendar that reminds us of feeling betrayed, of loss, of so many dang unanswered questions. The story invites us to look at pain and loss in a new way.

In a faith tradition that has often shamed me for not having the answers, or applauded me when I pretend to know it all, I see a glimpse of what true faith just might be: questioning.

For years, I needed to have the answers but I find the questions and absolute chaos of Holy Week to be grounding. I find the doubt and confusion of the people in Jesus’ life to be reassuring. In Holy Week, I find the sadness and discontentment about why things are the way that they are to be incredibly moving. People of faith are not always meant to be people of answers.

I have started saying “I don’t know…” a LOT. And, it is just as much for me as it is for anyone else. Saying I don’t know reminds me that I don’t have the answers, I don’t have the way. I only know what I believe to be true, which is incredibly awkward for people looking for things like reassurance and hope sometimes. But the truth is that not only can I not provide it, I don’t always know that we have it. Sometimes things are bleak. Sometimes things feel unfair and untrue and painful. Sometimes things feel totally unnecessiarily hurtful.

But, that’s also the beauty of faith - it finds us where we are so often. And, if we let it, consoles us even though we are still with questions. It gives us the space and grace to cry, to wonder, to marvel. It is not mad when we ask questions, it is thrilled that we are human enough to ask the questions to begin with. And, if any time shows us that— it is the week where we remember that even Jesus cried out “God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Let us allow ourselves to do the same from time to time, and be ok with the not knowing.