What Questions Would You Live?

When I was taking English Composition as a student at Western, my instructor gave us one of those assignments that have the potential to change a life forever. I don’t know how it affected others in the class, but it shaped me. She had us read Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. One particular page spoke volumes to me. I guess because it made so much sense. Rilke writes:

I would like to beg of you, dear friend, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day. (pg. 35).

I don’t know if I could come up with a better definition for the life of faith, or at least what living by faith looks like in a real life. Life in college demands so much faith, because so many things continue to remain unsolved in the heart. Questions like, “Am I in the right major?” or “what will I do when I graduate?” seem to haunt students from the day they first arrive. The good news is that eventually life destinies do get figured out.

I love that phrase, “live the question.” What questions would you live? The really cool thing is that as we live into the questions of our lives, instead of trying to run away from them or give them a quick fix, we ultimately find ourselves living more deeply into God’s life. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). As we seek Him to be all of these things for us, the big questions in our lives find the right answers.

I want to encourage you to be patient to all that “remains unsolved in your heart.” Listen to your heart and know that this is where the Lord speaks the most.

Blessings,

Sami