The Most Dangerous Question

I am a guy who loves questions. I love to question everything and every process and every rule I encounter to see just how much scrutiny it holds up to. I especially love it when people ask me questions. I love being the answer man. Questions, questions, questions. It's how I learn and grow.

I wonder now if God is the same as me in this regard. I know when Jesus was on earth He was the master at answering questions with really insightful questions in reply. So in that sense, it was never really a good idea to ask Jesus a question because, more often than not, you left with a metaphorical limp.

I have been asking God a lot of questions over the past year. Why didn't this happen? Why am I still in a city full of sucky sports teams? Why does everyone else prosper by God's grace? Why is God so intent on holding me back? Why did I succeed so overwhelmingly and easily in seminary only to sit the bench in real life? Why have none of my crazy schemes worked? Why, why, why, why, why?

Yet it occurs to me that the question most important to me is the most profoundly unanswered question in the Bible. Honestly, I really appreciate more and more the parts of the Bible where God does absolutely no talking, and people are forced to cling to the rumors and almost-forgotten promises of generations past. Books like Esther, Ecclesiastes, Judges, Nehemiah, the really long middle of Job, the end of Genesis, and even the New Testament epistles bear testimony to the sometimes excruciating ordeal of having only the benefit of hindsight in seeing the fingerprints of God's workings behind the scenes.

And that's the only way to answer the hard and painful why questions. I think, like Job, if God even got close to telling us why then our brains would explode and our faces would melt. OK, so not EXACTLY like Job....

Why? Because He is God and He gets to decide what happens and when it happens. It's a perk of being God. That may sound trite and easy at first, but it is assuredly not, because God is also good and loving and faithful and longsuffering and present with us always. These traits are hard to fuse together because, at least in my mind, the good and loving thing to do would be to tell me all the stuff that will happen.

But I guess for me, "such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain..."

But seriously, why am I the way that I am? Anyone?