I've Got Questions: The Spiritual Practice of Having It Out with God

by Erin Hicks Moon

Now I know striking the match feels like it might kill you, but it won’t. The only thing that will kill you is pretending everything is okay when it’s not.

grief can be a profound gift. It’s the way we signal to ourselves and our people: this means something to me, and I am bereft without it.

John Green says, “Grief doesn’t change you [. . .] it reveals you,”3 and it reveals what was holding you up.

you have a strong faith because you wrestle, not in spite of your wrestling. It is a gift. Don’t believe anything to the contrary.

You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking. Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved

Whatever version of faith those dissenters are protecting, it might not be yours anymore. So give them back the key and wish them well. Just because they say it, doesn’t make it so.

“No matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love” (1 Cor. 13:3).

Your broken heart, your anger, your rage, your frustration, they’re marquees naming what is important to you.

Allow the disturbance in your soul to be a compass pointing you in the direction of your next steps.

The key to anger is to keep moving through it. If you let it flow through you, it activates you to change. It’s when you stuff it down and stop it up that you get yourself into trouble.

exploration is not the same as pledging allegiance to a belief system. And belief systems are not the same as loving God.

Until we open ourselves to the possibility of God loving us, yes, and liking us, enjoying us, we will not be able to believe it’s true for anyone else.

What if loving God and loving people is the work of our lives, and we filter everything in our faith through that?

The pie chart of the things we know is a sliver, and the mystery makes up the majority. What we have to go on is an ancient library of books written over the course of centuries, translated imperfectly, and interpreted—with mostly good intentions—out of personal bias.

If Jesus was so worried about everyone conforming to the exact same beliefs, why didn’t he spend more time in the temples, clarifying Scripture with the rabbis, instead of hanging out with kids and telling stories?

Of course we’re wrong. Could it be that getting it right was never the goal in the first place?

Alison Escalante, “Scientists Think They Just Found the Brain’s Spirituality Network,” Forbes, August 24, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonescalante/2021/08/24/scientists-think-they-just-found-the-brains-spirituality-network/?sh=1123286319b4.