LIVE INTO THE ANSWERS

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) Austrian poet and novelist wrote,

“I ask you, dear sir, to have patience with all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves, like closed rooms, like books written in a foreign language. Don’t try to find the answers now. They cannot be given anyway, because you would not be able to live them. For everything is to be lived. Live the questions now. Perhaps you then may gradually, without noticing, one day in the future live into the answers.”

I find this advice to be very appropriate for the disciple of Jesus who constantly speaks and desires ‘the future’ when everything will be perfect, sinless and without concern. Though we look forward to “a new heaven and new earth” perhaps Rilke’s verse is wise: “We live the questions now.” And “in the future we live into the answers.” Until then, we live wisely by faith and hard work believing for what the Lord has promised now and in the future. “Try to love the questions.” “Live into the answers.”

“You don’t understand now what I am doing, but someday you will.” Jesus