Guru, Who're You?

A week or so ago, I wrote about wanting to be the hero.  Well, there is something else I have always wanted to be, too: the guru.

(Hint: It doesn't really work out, either.)

I've wanted to be the one with all the answers.  The endless well of knowledge, the go-to for all of life's questions from "What aisle are the matchsticks on?" to "Why does God allow pain?" to "What creates a black hole?"

And I came pretty close to having all the answers.  What I didn't know, I could make up and still sound convincing.  (As demonstrated in a group dynamics class in college, when the professor had us debating an issue then threw a curveball and told us to take the other position; to this day, nobody knows where I really stand.)  Rather than making me a guru, though, I found that having all the answers made me arrogant, insecure, and downright annoying.  Not to mention the pain it caused because yes, I would take it personally and be horribly offended if you didn't ask my opinion or follow my advice.

The curse of the genius.

I thought the answers mattered.  I thought knowing it all was important.  I thought this was not just a way to define myself, but to build a connection with everyone (because who wouldn't want a piece of this?) and also a way to control a world we have such little control over.

The truth, though is this, and this is the defining moment: You can think you have all the answers, talk a good game, answer every nagging why, and be a super genius but even in all of that, there is one question that will thwart you:

"What's missing?"

It thwarts you because it is the nagging question, the one that refuses to go away.  It is this constant gnawing in your heart that knows that for all your effort and all your study and all your poetic wax, there is something viciously hollow that is just draining you.  And that question - what's missing - taunts you also in this: you cannot answer it.

It is a question deeper in spirit than this world has an answer for.  We know because we have tried to answer it, and we have watched others try to answer it - this is where we get our addictions, our attitudes, our bitterness, and our brokenness.  From trying to answer a question that is beyond our answer.  It is a question beyond logic, beyond research, beyond study, beyond the tangible or the words or the theories or the ideas.

When you realize you can't answer the gnawing and you finally give up trying (which won't be right away; it's a painful road), what you find is that Someone else can absolutely answer it.  He starts chipping away at that question and even though you can't get the words around it, even though you'll never stand in front of an audience and declare your brilliance by expounding on this answer, even though you'll never even fully wrap your heart around it, you sense it's being answered.  You know He's answering it.

In that answer, you find something else: you were never as smart as you thought you were.  In fact, for all you have ever claimed to know, you actually know very little.

Back in my guru days, I had an hours-long interview with a man who was looking at my story, looking at my life, looking at me.  And I longed to impress him.  When he wrote me with his impressions, I was absolutely horrified - he appreciated my story and the honesty with which I could speak of things, but he also noted that I was a person of "limited insight."

He was right.  (He wasn't right until a few years ago when I found that gnawing question and began finding the answer to it.  Before that, He was absolutely wrong and a total moron, obviously.  Today, he's right.)

I didn't have the insight.  Maybe I still don't.  Back then, I would have boasted that I was living a wise life, a smart life, an intelligent life because I knew it all....but I think that life today is wiser because I haven't a clue.

The answer to that nagging question, the answer to what's missing...the answer that He's longing to put on our hearts...is that the power of living is in our questions.  It is in asking the right questions, the deep questions, the honest questions that get at the heart of something.  That matter.  And that somehow, all circle back to the thirsty question - the deep desire, the insatiable hunger, the absolute thirst for something more.  Something missing.  Something holy.  Something Eden.

Jesus was a guy who very rarely answered a question straight-up.  You know that had to frustrate people.  And I would venture to bet that if you asked Christ what was the answer to two + two, He would have had some long drawn-out story ending with a question like, 'But what you know is the two, and what is that for?'  He'd never just say 4.  Because that's the answer, but that's not the answer.

The answer is in our asking.  It is in our learning to look beyond the concrete, the tangible, and even the seemingly obvious or simple and dive into the deepest of desire to look for that something more.  To ask the questions and let the answers be in our heart instead of our ego.  To learn to stand by someone else asking the question and not feel like we have to answer it.

We don't.  We don't have to answer.  All we have to do is learn to ask the question and be thirsty enough to drink in the answer, which will come plainly into our hearts in His presence...and we'll smile, though we'll never know the words.  Our joy will have to share His answer; our lives will have to speak.