John Walt

As people who live in the information age, we are used to being able to find answers to almost any questions we have. Finding these answers has gotten infinitely easier over just the last 50 years. My parents had libraries and encyclopedias when they were in high school, and now we have AI in our pockets searching the far reaches of human knowledge and providing us with almost instant answers in a format of our choosing. Rewind the clock of human civilization a couple of hundred years, and access to books and libraries was unthinkable for most people. In a relatively short period of time, we have experienced an overwhelming surge in our access to information. We want clear answers to every question we have, and we want it right now. The problem with this expectation is that it predisposes us to be unable to find the answers to the most important questions in our lives.

Who was I created to be? What is the purpose of my life? What career should I have? How do we want to raise our kids? These are obviously big questions that take time and process to answer. Most of us have thought we found the answers to these questions, only to realize later we didn’t have any idea. I used to desperately want to have clear answers to all the biggest questions in my life. I even wanted to know where my life was headed and how it would look years down the road. I would get really frustrated when it felt like God was changing the plan up on me. For instance, I thought I was going to spend my life in the darkest places in the world as some sort of traveling do-gooder/God guy. Then I got healing and felt God pulling me in the opposite direction. Ok, so I am going to be a mega-rich business guy shaping the world through influence and creative problem solving. Only to find out I was wrong again. I wasted unknown amounts of brain power trying to figure out who I was and where I was headed.

If you're following God, where you will be in 5 years is none of your business.

Scott Dohner introduced me to a concept years ago that I call “holding things in tension.” I would come in wrestling with these big questions, and he would ask why I was trying to find an answer to that in the first place. Or other times, I would come in with what I thought was the answer to where we should live or the direction my business was headed. He would challenge me to take that thought and put it in a hermetically sealed jar on the shelf. Don’t get rid of it, don’t forget about it, but set it on the metaphorical shelf of my mind and stop trying to find an immediate answer. Let the answer be revealed in time as you hold the question, thought, or idea in tension. Over the years, I have put a lot of jars on that shelf.

Something interesting happened to me in this process of doing this. I became more comfortable with unanswered questions. I also accepted that the answers I think I have are likely wrong or incomplete. Over time, this new way of approaching big questions has bled into the smaller questions as well. Is this person someone I should spend more time with? Is a certain company a good client to have? Should we buy a new house or keep our old one? What I learned about letting go of the need for immediate answers is that it creates space for process. It makes room for God to grow my thinking and perspective, for me to let go of insecurities and fears surrounding the question I am asking.

The hairdresser car

I recently went through one of these processes around buying a new truck. I loved my old truck very much, but we started doing a lot of long-distance towing, and it wasn’t up to the task. It culminated in my truck breaking down. My immediate response was that I should just buy a new truck. We went to several dealerships, and something just didn’t feel right. So, after praying about it a lot, I decided to fix the old truck and wait to make a decision. I kept looking at trucks and wrestling with what I should get. Should I buy a fancy new truck or a used one? In that tension, I discovered that I was wanting people to think a certain way about me. I didn’t like that, it didn’t feel right that I should be letting what other people think influence the decision about what truck to buy. I began praying into it. Surprisingly, one day I walked outside, looked at my wife’s old car sitting in the driveway, and thought, why don’t I drive that for a while. I had seen that car in the driveway for 2 years and never thought about driving it, and then it just suddenly seemed like the thing I needed to do. So I did, it was a 20-year-old small SUV with a cracked dash, a dent in the bumper, and clear coat peeling in places. I couldn’t explain why I thought it was a good idea because my truck was working fine, but I felt I needed to drive her old car.

I was working on a project with a friend from Australia at the time, and he started calling my car the Hairdresser car. It’s the perfect name because that's exactly what it looked like. I realized pretty quickly that lots of insecurity surfaced when I pulled up to a meeting in this car. What will clients think of me driving this old car? I am a business strategy advisor, and I need to look somewhat successful. I loved finding this hidden insecurity in me. I started thanking God for the opportunity to drive the old car because it was helping free me from caring what people think of me and my own personal need to drive a manly-looking vehicle. I drove my wife’s old car for 6 months, and it was an awesome experience. I ended up finding a great used truck that we felt like God wanted us to have. What truck you drive is not that important a question, but in the process of holding it in tension, I was blessed to find a new level of freedom. A car or truck is just a form of transportation; it doesn’t speak to who we are or define us. I needed to let go of pride and insecurity, and holding that question in tension and letting God guide me through a process helped to get another layer of freedom.

Heather and I have been through similar processes in every area of our lives. The more we learn to hold things in tension and allow room for process, we are blessed in unique ways. We thought we wanted to live in the city because that's where our friends were, but over two years of looking at houses and praying about where to live we realized we really wanted to have more space and live in the country. At times, we felt crazy for not just “making up our minds.” But that's the lie, and I have heard so many people say this to me over the years. Our culture does not create room for process and God is always inviting us into process where we die, grow and become a little more of who He created us to be.

There is more to this idea of holding things in tension. Often, we do not have the wisdom, perspective, or clarity to see the answer God is leading us to. I certainly have never had the clarity to see or the wisdom to understand what God was doing in my life in the big things and the small things. Holding the questions in tension allows us to grow in our understanding so that we can embrace what God is doing at the right time. I would have rejected most things about my life or judged them as bad if I had been able to see the whole picture ahead of time. Through many layers of dying, maturing, and growing, I came to desire and embrace things that at one time I would have rejected. We are made for process and the questions we ask guide the journey we go on but we have to make room for it to happen or we are cheating ourselves of the real answer.

Most married people can agree that you don’t really know who you are marrying when you get married. For instance, hobbies, interests and even personalities seem to change over a lifetime. If you are not expecting this change, it can be really jarring. The question, “Who is my wife?” is not one that will ever be fully answered. Of course, we can know in some sense their heart but we have to accept that there is so much to another person that we cannot expect to know all of their heart fully. In other words, it is a mystery and should always be a mystery. We should be asking the rest of our lives, “Who is my husband/wife?” It is a question that should never be fully answered. But in continuing to ask the question, we are pulled deeper into the journey of knowing our life partner.

The same is true about our relationship with God. Most theology is man's attempt to answer the big questions about God without actually knowing God. As soon as we think we have an answer to the question “who is God,” We can be certain we are wrong because at the very least, it is incomplete and, at worst, outright wrong.

Many questions about God and His creation don’t have yes or no, right or wrong answers. How is God present with all of us all the time? What makes Him sometimes do miraculous things and other times seemingly do nothing? What does it mean that He loves us? When we ponder these questions about God in relationship with Him, we begin to develop understanding. It doesn’t give us a clean textbook answer to the question, but it guides how we relate to God, ourselves, and others. If we want to be people who are in relationship with God, our questions about God need to take us deeper into relationship, not just drive us to latch onto theories about Him. Salvation is not a corporate thing that happens because we have the right set of beliefs; it is a personal thing that happens through surrender to and a relationship with God.

Each of our lives is shaped by questions, but they aren’t the kind you can Google or ask AI. In order to hold things in tension, we have to embrace asking questions that take us on journeys rather than asking questions so that we can get an answer.

- John Walt