How Asking Why Saved My Life
Why is a tiny three-letter word, but it’s as powerful as any pen and as potent as any prayer. A word and a question that all of us should incorporate and invoke in our daily life. Like any good habit, it can draw us nearer to God and closer to Divine wisdom.
A word that makes us better because it seeks truth and the Truth. A word that makes the world better because it holds the powerful accountable. A word that makes us stop and ask, what is life’s purpose? While it’s not the Word, it is the word that begins all spiritual journeys.
We ask why because we’re curious, because we want to understand more of something or someone’s story and/or when we realize that something isn’t right or real about our current reality. It’s both implicit and explicit to every hero’s journey as they begin their adventure; their quest; their exploration for meaning.
Asking why sets us apart from all the other creatures God created. This includes animals who are intensely intelligent or emotionally emotive like dolphins, elephants and domesticated animals. There is something special about this God given gift that’s uniquely human, like aspiration and autonomy.
Asking why, is God’s antidote to an acceptance of awfulness or authoritarianism. God doesn’t seek our misery, we do. We create countries and communities that are not about love of neighbor. But we also have the capability to question and to change ourselves and the world by asking why.
Like all gifts from above, Evil seeks to undermine God by diverting and distracting us with stuff and status. Sedating our souls as we spiritually sleepwalk through life. A slumbering existence for daily bread even if we cannot live by bread alone.
When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But I was also inquisitive. Asking why of the adults in my life. Questions that were simple and serious. Why are the seasons named what they’re named? Why are their seasons? Why are seasons part of God’s world?
It’s only when I became a man, did I give up my childish ways of asking why. Obeying my adult responsibilities so I could reward myself with adult pleasures. Only to understand that asking why would led me back to God. Like a Prodigal child realizing their suffering, their arrogance and their emptiness that comes from pursuing a life of materialism.
At fifty-five I would become a man born again. Repentant and realigned with God’s way of love, not my way of self-destruction; the way of Evil. I can see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
While my renewal of faith started after a serious of setbacks in my life, it really began with one word; why. No longer willing to accept and acquiesce to a system, a kingdom that was not about love of neighbor and therefore has nothing to do with God. Seduced by Babylon into believing I lived in paradise only to realize that I was lost in a Potemkin plotline.
This patriotic, church going Eagle scout and honors student believed everything I was taught about the American myth. Believing that merit alone wins the day, that trusted institutions would do no harm and that our government would only serve the interest of the people; not the selfish interests of those who financially reward them.
Like self-serving politicians and self-absorbed institutional leaders, my professional career mirrored their values. Marketing pharmaceutical products to physicians and potential patients to produce profit. Naïve in my thinking that companies would value wealth versus health. Thinking that’s made easier by never asking why.
When people do ask why and question the powerful, the ruling class, they are often ridiculed, censored, harmed or murdered. Which is why asking why is so perilous. It’s about seeking truth that’s been imperiled for monetary gain or momentary reign which can be very threatening to those who benefit through deceit and deception. Pursuing the truth will always set you free, but it might also kill you.
As I continued to ask why privately and publicly in my life, I realized that the life of Truth I sought, only happens by accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. A life that rejects ultimate loyalty to any earthly kingdom. A life that honors God by living a life of righteous Love. A life of humility; a life that asks why.