The Slow Way: Friendship in the Shared Questions

What if it’s the questions that carry us, not necessarily the answers?

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

What I was trying to say to August in the car last week was that I really do appreciate rap, I just struggle to really get behind his generation’s rap. Which I know, totally makes me an old lady. It’s just that these days they rap “too fast” for my taste. (Yes, I said that. Elderly Millennial.) And, of course, there is the constant degrading of women. He’s trying to help me understand his love of Tyler the Creator, who I’m just not on board with yet. And, of course, Kendrick Lamar, who I agree is incredibly talented, and whose musicality is unmatched. But still. His language. The way he talks about women and sex. 

“But Mom! He’s so deep. And he talks about life and meaning in this thoughtful way…” 

August knows how to convince me to give something another listen. 

I was thinking about Kendrick’s faith and his questions and my kid’s faith and his questions while I drove the older boys home from sleepaway camp last week. How do we know when art has value? The world is complicated. So are our relationships.

While the boys were away at camp I started reading Miraslav Volf’s new book Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most, which he wrote with Matthew Croasmun and Ryan McAnnally-Linz. In the Introduction, they touch for a moment on something C.S. Lewis wrote in The Four Loves, a book I read twenty-three years ago and barely remember. (Maybe I should pick it up again?) In it, they said, Lewis distinguishes between mere companions and true friends. “With our companions,” they wrote, “we share some common activity, whether it’s a religion, a profession, an area of study, or just a favorite pastime. . .Friendship requires something more: a shared question.” They quoted Lewis, saying that the one “who agrees with us that some question, little regarded by others, is of great importance, can be our Friend. [They] need not agree with us about the answer.” 

The friendships, the real ones, are found in the shared questions, not necessarily the shared answers. Whenever I’ve prayed for my kids and their friendships, I’m realizing that this is what I’ve been asking for. That they might find the friends who are willing to ask the good, true questions, no matter what answers they come to. Let them choose the friends who ask the good questions. 

This idea has rung true all the way through for me these past two weeks, as I’ve thought about my dreams for my kids, but also as I’ve thought about my marriage, now 19 years and one month deep into life together. This, I’m understanding, is what has sustained us. I married a man who was asking the same questions as I was, who has not stopped asking the big and difficult and confounding questions alongside me, despite the fact that sometimes we have gotten different answers, and sometimes the questions have felt like they might just break our hearts. 

What if it’s the questions that have carried us, not necessarily the answers?

That’s what I said about Kendrick in the car to August as he played Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers for me again. Listen, I said to my son. I don’t agree with everything Kendrick is coming to in his lyrics, or how he’s getting there. But you’re right about his questions. They’re good ones. 

Some truths are simple. I want to live a life that runs deep, that isn’t satisfied with surface conversations and easy answers. I want a faith that isn’t easily satisfied either. 

In his longest recorded sermon, Jesus taught about the importance of the process. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” 

Asking, I’ve learned, isn’t a one and done process. Just as searching is a thing that keeps on going. We turn the room over until we find one treasure, and then—amazingly?— that treasure leads us to hunt for the next one. 

Ask and search, Jesus said. Knock. And do it together. Ask and search and knock together. 

I love answers, and I want them. And some of the answers I’ve found in the process have been everything to me. One of those answers is Jesus. I’m so grateful for that answer. It sustains me. It points me in the direction of all the other questions, of all that I’m seeking after. It’s the path I’m asking along. 

That’s what I’ll keep telling my kids as they navigate friendships, as they try to make sense of a world that is far more complicated than the world I navigated as a teenager thirty years ago. “Who is asking the good questions?” I’ll say. “Find them.” 

And I’ll keep doing the same. Asking, searching, knocking on all the doors. And maybe the doors will open and there will be more doors. And the gift of all of it will be the ones holding our hands, lifting their other hands to the doors, pounding them down, right alongside us. 

 

A Slow Practice

Today we have a journaling practice, so pull that journal or paper out. You may even want a big sheet of paper for this one. Or as you’re working through it, you may realize that you need more space. Just go with it as you need. We’re journaling in a spiral today, making a helix of our questions. 

At the top of your page, write these words: Ask and Search and Knock. 

Then move to the middle of your page and spend some time considering your life’s biggest, most confounding question. What is the question that has shaped everything else in your life? Write it down. 

Now spiral out from there, and surround those words with your next question. What question flows from it? For example, if your life’s biggest question is “Why are we here?” perhaps your next question that flows from it is, “Why am I here?” and the following question is “What is my purpose?” 

Give yourself time to let each question flow into the next, circling around one another in a spiral formation, allowing yourself the time and space to feel the intensity of each question and your own desire to find the answers. Allow yourself as much time as you need to fill your page with a large spiral—your life of questions. Stop only when you feel satisfied. 

Now is the time to take a deep breath. In and out as slowly as you can. 

I once heard someone describe prayer as asking the Spirit to hover over us like a metal detector hovers over the sand. Our response is simply to listen when the “metal detector” beeps: something is there that we should pay attention to. What’s here in your list of questions? What questions do you need to notice right now, at this moment in your life?

There are no guarantees that your questions have answers waiting for you. But if the Spirit wants you to notice, I believe there is something important for you in the question. Are you willing to find out?

Spend some time in silence.

Let’s close with this prayer: 

Divine One who equips the askers, the searchers, and the knockers, teach me to ask the questions that will open me up to the life you dream for me. And bring me to the others who are asking the good questions too. Amen.

One more thing:

I announced my new book Blessed Are The Rest of Us: How Limits and Longing Make Us Whole this week on Instagram! It doesn’t come out until April but can preorder it here or here or here! Preordering is an amazing to support my book because it shows book carriers that it’s worth investing in, and it shapes the way my book may be received when it comes out next spring. It’s always a good way to support an author whose work matters to you. Thanks so much, friends.