A New Title

I changed the title of my blog today from "Living in the Now" to "Living in the Question".  Not that anyone cares (except me!), but it seemed more descriptive of how I was actually blogging.  I'm not consistent enough with blogging to talk about living in the now... ha!  It seems that most of why I write is to wrestle with questions, paradoxes and tensions and, indeed, my life always seems to be full of them, so I have plenty of material.  I like the quote by Rainer Maria Rilke in the header and am challenged to love the questions and live the questions.  After all, if my life is full of questions and I wait to really live until they've all been answered, I'll never live.

Our culture is so "answer" oriented that holding the tension of an unanswered question is practically intolerable.  We want life wrapped up; nailed down...  But, if we're honest, it's in that messy tension of "not quite, almost, unsure" that most of us live.   Questions destabilize us and we worry that a question might knock out the foundations of things we already knew or were comfortable with.  Living with a question is disconcerting at best. 

I like what Sue Monk Kidd says:

There's an art to living your questions.  You peel them.  You listen to them.  You let them spawn new questions.  You hold the unknowing inside.  You linger with it instead of rushing into half-baked answers.... those who "loiter" in the question long enough will "live into" the answer.  "Seek and ye shall find," said Jesus (Matt. 7:7).  I sometimes read that as, "Seek long enough and ye shall find."  You see, it's the patient act of dwelling in the darkness of a question that eventually unravels the answer.  

May I be patient in the question... may I loiter long enough to live into the answer... may I get comfortable with discomfort...