“What are you doing after the race?”
The dreaded question is always looming. Sometimes, it brings fear. Other times, it brings excitement and anticipation. It maneuvers itself in almost every other conversation and expends countless thoughts. For a long time, the answer to the dreaded question consumed me. And some days, it still does. But these days, what I’m learning, what I am choosing to live, is the beauty of living in the question.
I still have no idea what I am going to do after the race. I still don’t have an answer. Sure, I have ideas, dreams, and possibilities. But, I don’t have an answer. So many prayers have been prayed about the future and what it will entail. So many prayers have been about an answer. A sense of security in so many ways. But here I am, without an answer. I’ve spent a lot of time in frustration. I’ve spent a lot of time questioning why God hasn’t revealed what’s next for me. But in that, what I realized, was that I was seeking an answer more than I was seeking God, and that’s a dangerous road to travel down.
But God, in his graciousness, is teaching me something through it all. He is teaching me that He doesn’t mind when his children ask question. What He minds is when a lack of an answer disrupts a right relationship with Him, because His ways are higher than our ways, and He has a perspective that we don’t have. I’ve spent too long questioning God’s motives. I’ve spent too long wondering why I don’t have an answer and have fumbled through a variety of possibilities…”am I being punished or does God not have a good plan for my life?” But this couldn’t be father from the truth. The truth of it all is that God wants the dialogue. He doesn’t want our conversation to stop, and often times, with an answer, comes the end of a conversation. God wants us to hear and discover things, and that doesn’t always happen over night. And beyond that, maybe there is a better question we could be asking. There could be more of His character that He wants us to experience, because daily communion with Christ, that’s the point. That’s the true answer.
I want to live in a way that celebrates the question. I want to be as happy with the question as with the answer, because the answer isn’t what’s important. I want my days to reflect my intimacy with Christ. I want the peace of Christ to be so evident in my life. I want to live in the question, because above all, it shows my great trust in a perfect Father; a Father that is always for us.
So no matter what big question is looming, no matter if you are graduating in a month and don’t know what is to come, if you are searching for a job, or just living with uncertainty, let’s choose to thrive in the question.
“Life with God at its core is about giving your life up to something bigger and more powerful. It’s about saying at every turn that God knows better than we know, and that his Spirit will lead us in ways that we couldn’t have predicted. I have known that, but I haven’t really lived that. There is a loosey-goosey feeling to the future now, both a slight edge of anxiety, like anything can happen, and a slight bubble of hope and freedom that, well, anything can happen.”
–Shauna Niequist, Cold Tangerines
