"..I would like to beg you...  as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."

Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903 in Letters to a Young Poet

This is one of my favorite small pieces of writing.  I use it to calm my perfectionist self... as a balm for the me that wants to control outcomes... the me that can sometimes be convicted of Jesus’ accusation: “O you, of little faith.” What faith, what courage it takes to “live the questions.” I am better at it than I used to be, but not as good as I mean to be.

On a recent morning I was trying to tread water in the endless quicksand of my question list. I decided to write them all out in my journal. The more I wrote the more agitated I became: "God, isn’t it time for you to fix some of this stuff?” My journal writing went on for a while and when I finally came up for air, an old hymn favorite crept into my mind:  

'Tis so sweet to trust in Jesus,
and to take him at his word;
just to rest upon his promise,
and to know, "Thus saith the Lord."

Jesus, Jesus, how I trust him!
How I've proved him o'er and o'er!
Jesus, Jesus, precious Jesus!
O for grace to trust him more!

Okay, God! I get it... at least for a minute, I get it: Trust you with the unanswered questions? Okay, thank you, God!

Imagine my delight when I stumbled on the following poem called Reassurance. It is Alice Walker’s late 20th century response to Rilke:

I must love the questions
themselves
as Rilke said
like locked rooms
full of treasure
to which my blind
and groping key
does not yet fit.

and await the answers
as unsealed
letters
mailed with dubious intent
and written in a very foreign
tongue.

and in the hourly making of myself
no thought of Time
to force, to squeeze
the space
I grow into.

from the book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved

So, through what situations is God speaking to you?  By what means do you discern the Creator in your life?