STORY OF THE WEEK: When Churches Can't Handle Honest Questions

Why Mystery Makes Faith Stronger, Not Weaker

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When I was a kid, my church tried to let people ask anything.

It didn’t last long.

I grew up in a church that smelled faintly of old hymnbooks and furniture polish. Stained glass windows turned the morning sun into coloured patches on the carpet. The wooden pews creaked and pinched the backs of your knees if you sat too still for too long. Up front, a giant pipe organ towered over everything, silent and gathering dust because no one alive knew how to play it.

Our pastor back then was always trying to make things feel a little more alive, a little less stuffy. One Sunday, he set out a wooden box on a small table by the door — a question box. Write down any question you liked, drop it in, and each week he’d pull one out and try to answer it from the pulpit.

Anonymously.

It felt radical in a place built on having all the answers. I remember someone asked if Adam and Eve had belly buttons. Everyone laughed. The pastor fumbled through an explanation, and the box stayed. Then someone asked if dogs went to heaven. Then someone asked if people who’d never heard of Jesus were all going to hell.

And then came the question no one wanted to answer: If God is so good, why do bad things happen?

The next Sunday, the box was gone. No announcement, no explanation. Just gone. The big questions went back underground, where everyone quietly kept them, unanswered, humming in the pews beneath the sound of the creaky old organ, no one played.

The Trouble with Needing to Know

Looking back now, I don’t blame that old church for closing the box. Certainty felt safer. If you crack the door for one unanswerable question, who knows what else might blow in?

Doubt. Discomfort. Honest confession that maybe we don’t know as much as we say we do.

We were trained — gently, firmly — to believe that real faith meant airtight explanations. Every verse in its proper place. Every mystery resolved if you just squint at it from the right angle. We built our sermons, our songs, and our Sunday school lessons on the promise that there was always an answer.

But what no one said out loud was how heavy that certainty could become. How it made you pretend to understand things your gut knew you didn’t. How it turned honest wonder into something dangerous. How it taught you to silence your own questions, or worse, to shame others for asking theirs.

Certainty feels a lot safer but sooner or later, life rattles the bars. A tragedy that no verse can tidy up. A prayer that goes unanswered. A moment of beauty or grief too big to explain. And you’re left standing there with a broken question box in your hands, wondering if there’s more room in God than you were told there was.

Mystery Isn’t the Enemy

The older I get, the more I realise how much of the Christian story depends on mystery. Some of the most important moments in life can’t be explained. Stand beside a newborn baby, or sit by the bed of someone taking their final breath — words fail. We reach for explanations but find ourselves whispering silence instead.

Faith is no different. From the very start, Christians have held truths that don’t fit inside tidy boxes. Jesus himself was a walking paradox: fully human yet fully divine, born as a helpless baby yet called the Word through whom all things were made. He told us the first would be last, the greatest would be the servant, the meek would inherit the earth. He forgave enemies, broke religious rules, and answered questions with more questions.

The heart of the gospel isn’t a formula to memorise. It’s a mystery to step into. The early church called communion the mystery of faith. For centuries, believers have stepped forward to receive bread and wine not because they understood it, but because they trusted something deeper was happening than they could see.

Mystery is the thread running through it all: the Spirit who blows where it will, the Kingdom that is here and not yet, the God who is hidden and revealed at once. This isn’t a problem to be fixed. It’s an invitation to humility and awe.

The theologian Karl Rahner once said, “The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.” He knew what our old question box couldn’t hold: real faith doesn’t run from what it can’t explain. It leans in closer.

Even Paul, who loved a good argument, confessed, “Now we see through a glass, darkly… now I know in part.” (1 Corinthians 13:12). The closer he drew to Jesus, the more he admitted how much he didn’t know.

A faith that needs every loose end tied up stops being faith. It becomes a system, a theory, a cage for the infinite. But a faith that welcomes mystery has room for wonder, room for humility, room for hope that isn’t built on having it all worked out.

Maybe that’s what the question box was trying to teach us all along.

When Certainty Hurts More Than It Helps

Certainty works for a while. It helps us feel like we have some control. If there’s a reason for everything, maybe the pain won’t feel so random. Maybe the fear won’t feel so big.