Sacred Questions (Series Intro)

I have the privilege of working with people who have followed a call in their lives to serve in cultures foreign to their own. The struggles they face, the challenges in life presented by the culture, environment, politics, and varying degrees of acceptance, antagonism, or aggression towards their religious beliefs, are difficulties they have chosen. These are ordinary people who have accepted an extraordinary call in their lives, trusting that the one who has called them is also the one who will keep them through the challenges and show them the fulfillment, encouragement, of their obedience / faithfulness.

Barnabas Piper, in his book "Help my Unbelief" described the tension we as Christians live in saying, "Our faith is one of brutal tensions. Not everyone can express this, but every Christian knows it. We feel it in our guts. We feel the motion of the up and down and down and up. We feel as if we’re going to bust in half as we’re pulled in two directions at once. Tension is our state of being for all of this life, and to live as a believer is to live in it." He goes on to write about how these tensions "...ebb, flow, spike, and ease off, but they’re always present. At points they have overwhelmed me, and other times they have hardened me because they seemed too much to accept. And all the time I feel the roiling of the seesaw’s rise and fall. My heart plays tug-of-war with me, sometimes over doubts and other times over sin. I trust but not as I should, not always. I obey but not as I ought, not always." These tensions are likely no where more evident than for those who live and work cross-culturally.

And often these tensions lead to questions. Over the course of the next several posts, I'll attempt to provide not only some of the questions, I've heard, but hopefully some encouragement in answers offered in scripture, through the one who has gone before us and is with us through and beyond these tensions.

“Waiting on God requires the willingness to bear uncertainty, to carry within oneself the unanswered question, lifting the heart to God about it whenever it intrudes upon one’s thoughts.” - Elisabeth Elliot