“The spiritual life is about allowing God to teach us about ourselves. The word education comes from the Latin word educare, which means to draw out. So much of modern education is based on imposing knowledge upon us, stuffing us full of information. But the best teachers have always been focused on drawing something out of the student. The best teachers draw out the-best-version-of-ourselves. They make us more of who we truly are.
Since Socrates and Plato, the greatest teachers have not used a lecture method, but rather a method of questions and dialogue. Everything good and true and beautiful has its roots in God, and thus we discover, in many ways throughout our lives through people, experiences, and opportunities, God is laying questions before us. Always the right question at the right time, if we listen closely. At the same time there are many other people and voices in your life proposing different questions.
The questions we choose to focus on can make all the difference.
The questions we ponder determine the quality of our lives. Ponder trivial and shallow questions and your life is likely to become just that. Spend your days pondering questions that challenge you to explore yourself, others, the world, God, and spirituality in new and exciting ways, and you will live a life uncommon.
I have often said that if you tell me the books you are going to read over the next 12 months, I can probably tell you how your life will change in the next year. The reason is because we become the books we read.
Questions have a similarly powerful effect on the direction and trajectory of our lives. A person who spends the next year pondering, “Should I get divorced?” will have a radically different experience than the person who focuses on the question, “What can I do to renew and transform my marriage?”
The questions we ask of ourselves, of others, of life, and of God have a profound and mysterious impact on our lives.
We are impatient and like the gratification of quick answers, but they do not satisfy. The most important answers are those that we wrestle with. The reason is because we yearn for deeply personal answers to our deeply personal questions. You have to dig long and hard to find many of those answers, but they are worth the soul-work they require.
Be patient with your questions. Nobody has explained this more eloquently than Rainier Maria Rilke: “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Throughout this series I will lay before you twenty-one questions. Some will intrigue you more than others, but stretch your soul, and try to write down some answer for each question no matter how short. And date your answer. Then come back again, in weeks or months, and answer them again.
Don’t be in a rush to answer the questions. Sit with them. Go deep into the questions. Answer them, and then answer them again. Date them. Come back to them. Add to them. When you add something, date the additions.
This is not because you will change your mind. The process is more profound than that. You will discover deeper parts of yourself. As you discover your deeper needs, talents, hopes, desires, and dreams, it is natural that your answers to many of life’s most important questions will change.
The questions in these videos are simply designed to begin the process. They will fan the fire in your heart, and you will begin to recognize the questions being posed to you in the midst of your everyday activities.
Some questions are big picture, and some questions are nuts and bolts practical. Both are necessary. Some questions are beautiful, and some questions are ugly. If we are to thrive and grow, we need to face both with courage. But all in all, as we do this soul-work, our questions should become ever more beautiful.
Enjoy the series. Together they form 21 questions that will absolutely change your life. So, get yourself a journal, and keep watching…”
