Maybe God KNew if we Knew all the answers we'd quit showing up

​I received hard news yesterday. Loss is always hard news. It's especially hard knowing you have two teenage sons, and loss, as little sense as it makes to any of us, makes littlest sense of all to teens.

It's especially hard when you recall the losses of your own teenage years. You remember your confusion. You remember wondering, if loss is such an inevitable part of this game called life, what is the point of playing it?

I confess, echoes of those teenage questions have never completely escaped me. I suppose that makes you fearful of the questions your kids will ask.

Maybe that's why it's such a helpless feeling being a dad whose superpower is not vaporizing questions you know full well are planning an invasion on your kids. And being a dad equally helpless at answering questions there just are no answers to.

Then I think about my heavenly father, the father who DOES have the power to vaporize questions before they invade. And yet, often he does not. The father who does have answers to questions there are no answers to. And yet, often he doesn't answer.

Why?

My best guess is, based on lessons from a long life obsessed with having answers, is that life is often not about the answers we receive but about the answers we come up with.

Memorizing the answers to the problems on the test will never be as useful as working your way through the problems on the way to discovering your own answers.

And there is also this. An important this.

God is not always great at showing up in my life with answers. But God is undefeated showing up in my life helping me navigate the questions. Even after I have countless times dismissed him and disowned him for showing up without answers.

I imagine that pains God much the way it does me, showing up and walking through the suffering of one's questions. But maybe no one knows better than God the power of showing up; maybe that is the most beautiful answer of all?

Showing up.

Maybe God feared if we ever knew all the answers, there would be no more showing up?

There is no greater isolation in the world than the island that keeps you from removing the suffering in the people you most desire to remove the suffering from.

But it is not an island we are meant to stay on. Even if it means leaving it to tend to questions without any answers at all.