Sometimes God will repeat a question to you, whether you ask him to or not.

Quite often, when he does so, it is an invitation to reflect on your initial response. “Are you sure about that?” Maybe it’s worth reconsidering. “Is that your final answer?” Maybe there is a deeper, truer answer.

In prayer, one of the most difficult habits to untrain one’s self from is the compulsion to ask questions. To ask for anything, whether a blessing, some help, or an answer. Most of our early training in prayer, (mostly by example), is to make requests. But you must untrain yourself to ask in order to leave space for God to do some asking.

Is not the main goal of faith. Sometimes it is indeed the smartest thing to simply walk away. On the other hand, the situation may call for walking straight up to evil, look it in the eyes and say, “Here I am. Do your worst.”

Admittedly, this makes zero sense. If you can turn and run, why stand still? If you can fight back, why not come out swinging? If you can call for backup, why stay silent?

Not really. Nowhere is 100% protected from pain, hurt, loss, meanness, betrayal, disappointment, or whatever.

There are, however, safer spaces. The more power we have to foster such environments for others, and the more wisely we can choose such places for ourselves, the better.

But in the end, everywhere is risky. Every space, every environment, every relationship. Even the safest spaces are not invulnerable. So the sooner we can stop being surprised at the inherent danger of being humans who live among other humans, the better.

Is essential to love. Without a sharing of one’s self, and without the acceptance of that self by another, there is no real love. At best there is only acquaintance. There might be cordiality and cooperation, and perhaps a degree of superficial familiarity, but nothing so intimate that it could be labeled “love.”

Love is a meandering journey of self-disclosure. It’s not a one-stop shop full of get-to-know-me trinkets. It’s not a questionnaire to be filled out and referred back to as needed. It’s not a speed train engineered to make the fastest trip between Point A and Point B. In fact, there is no Point B. No point of arrival.

Is whatever is anti-unity. Because Christ is pro-unity: “that they may be one as we are one.”

God’s self is a unit. If the doctrine of the Trinity bears any real importance on how we humans live, it is this: God demonstrates how the multiple are to be one. And this unified nature is what he desires his family to reflect out into the entire world—a world that is desperately divided. I hesitate to say “a world more divided than ever,” because that really may not be true. But I at least feel like it’s accurate to say “a world on a downward spiral of division.”

Can be hard to reckon with. If I’m being completely honest, even after 30 years of following Jesus pretty darn seriously, and after quite a number of prayers significantly answered, I’m sometimes still a little sore about the ones that were not.

Some of them I know never will be. The opportunity has passed. Some of them still could be, I suppose, but it’s been so long that I’ve pretty much stopped asking. And I suppose some of them may be answered in an unexpected way, but if the answer looks so different from the request that it doesn’t help me connect the dots—well, I don’t know what to do with that.

Jesus was sent into our world, not kept out of our world. In the same way, he sends his followers into the world; he does not extract them out of it. The endgame of the kingdom of God is not a life lived in religious domesticity, but a sojourning out in the wild.

“I’d like to repeat the advice that I gave you before, in that I think you really should make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do things which you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant to attempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”

-Chris McCandless, Into the Wild (by John Krakauer)

An important point when it comes to Jesus’ life in the wild—how he lived, how he sent out his disciples to live—is that it was not the “helter-skelter style of life” of McCandless. Jesus lived a bit more purposefully. Unpredictable, yet not unintentional. Jesus’ life was “set apart,” specially commissioned. This is the meaning of the religious word sanctified. His was not merely a rescue mission, but an invasion mission. Salvation is not merely from but to.

As with Jesus, so with us.

Binge watching the latest Netflix series. Youtube rabbit holes. The non-stop scrollability of social media. Even more old-fashioned means such as going to the movies, reading books, and workaholism still get a lot of traction.

There is no shortage of escape hatches to help you forget about reality and all its troubles. And there’s no shortage of someone trying to make a buck off of helpuing you check out.

And that includes religion.

By intensity? By frequency? By duration? By its cause? By its intentionality or spontaneity?

Perhaps these are all good qualities to consider. If you feel like you’re lacking joy, weighing these kinds of questions might pinpoint some barrier to joy. Or maybe even point out some joy that has been running deep in your heart like a subterranean stream, quiet and subtle and as of yet unnoticed.

It’s hard to hold anything together over the long haul. If for no other reason than it’s our human tendency to break up. To divide. To disagree. To rub each other the wrong way. To find it easier to go our own way.

And on the whole, this isn’t just because humans are rotten, but because life is challenging. Life is hard. Adversity comes. Seemingly insurmountable challenges come. We end up facing things we have no idea how to face. There are questions posed to us to which there are no simple answers.