Why I Rarely Give Simple Answers
I've noticed a pattern in how people respond when they bring me hard questions. Sometimes they leave satisfied. But sometimes — maybe more often than not — they leave with more questions than they came with. People come hoping for a clear answer and instead find me saying something like it depends or there's more than one thing true here or I'm not sure that's quite the right question.
I want to explain that. Not to defend it — but because I think understanding why might be more useful than any simple answer I can give.
I didn't start out this way. Early in ministry I was much more certain. I had a system. I had positions. I had frameworks. I could tell you fairly quickly what I thought about most things. All of it was genuine conviction and most of it was the confidence of youth. But a good bit of it — I can see now — was that I hadn't yet been sufficiently schooled by the real world.
Reality is a demanding teacher. It doesn't care about your framework. It just keeps presenting you with situations that I have repeatedly found don't fit as neatly into my framework as I’d like. Real lives were much more complicated than my neat categories. People had to make decisions where every available option cost something real. And I often found moments where two things I was completely sure of pointed in opposite directions.
You can respond to things like that in a few ways. You can maintain a tight grip on your framework and force reality into it — which produces a certain kind of confidence at the cost of actually paying attention what's in front of you.
Or you can abandon your frameworks altogether and just react — which produces a different kind of confidence but no wisdom at all.
Or you can let reality teach you something harder and more useful: that most important questions aren't puzzles to be solved but tensions to be navigated.
That third path is the one I’ve learned to choose and is what I want to write about in this series.
I'm not going to present a system because I don't think wisdom comes in systems. Instead, I hope to share a little bit of what four decades of paying attention has taught me — about how reality is actually structured, about what it means to think and live well inside that reality, and about why the shortcuts our culture offers are often shortcuts to places we don't really want to go.
I'll warn you in advance: some of this will be uncomfortable, not because I'm trying to be provocative, but because honest thinking is often uncomfortable. It was for me.
We live in a moment that rewards certainty and treats complexity as weakness. I will suggest almost the opposite — that wisdom requires holding things in tension without collapsing them into a simplistic answer to a complex problem, and that developing wisdom takes time, costs something, but, as Solomon said repeatedly in Proverbs, is worth everything.
I'm writing this partly because people have asked me over the years why I think the way I do and I want to put it down on paper to help me figure myself out. I'm also writing it partly because I am increasingly aware of my mortality—that I won't always be here—and that there are things I should leave with those that will be here when I am not.
Perhaps you will be able to use some of what I have learned. I don’t believe the world you're inheriting is going to reward simple answers, and I feel a responsibility to leave my congregation with some things that might equip you for that.
I want to explain that. Not to defend it — but because I think understanding why might be more useful than any simple answer I can give.
I didn't start out this way. Early in ministry I was much more certain. I had a system. I had positions. I had frameworks. I could tell you fairly quickly what I thought about most things. All of it was genuine conviction and most of it was the confidence of youth. But a good bit of it — I can see now — was that I hadn't yet been sufficiently schooled by the real world.
Reality is a demanding teacher. It doesn't care about your framework. It just keeps presenting you with situations that I have repeatedly found don't fit as neatly into my framework as I’d like. Real lives were much more complicated than my neat categories. People had to make decisions where every available option cost something real. And I often found moments where two things I was completely sure of pointed in opposite directions.
You can respond to things like that in a few ways. You can maintain a tight grip on your framework and force reality into it — which produces a certain kind of confidence at the cost of actually paying attention what's in front of you.
Or you can abandon your frameworks altogether and just react — which produces a different kind of confidence but no wisdom at all.
Or you can let reality teach you something harder and more useful: that most important questions aren't puzzles to be solved but tensions to be navigated.
That third path is the one I’ve learned to choose and is what I want to write about in this series.
I'm not going to present a system because I don't think wisdom comes in systems. Instead, I hope to share a little bit of what four decades of paying attention has taught me — about how reality is actually structured, about what it means to think and live well inside that reality, and about why the shortcuts our culture offers are often shortcuts to places we don't really want to go.
I'll warn you in advance: some of this will be uncomfortable, not because I'm trying to be provocative, but because honest thinking is often uncomfortable. It was for me.
We live in a moment that rewards certainty and treats complexity as weakness. I will suggest almost the opposite — that wisdom requires holding things in tension without collapsing them into a simplistic answer to a complex problem, and that developing wisdom takes time, costs something, but, as Solomon said repeatedly in Proverbs, is worth everything.
I'm writing this partly because people have asked me over the years why I think the way I do and I want to put it down on paper to help me figure myself out. I'm also writing it partly because I am increasingly aware of my mortality—that I won't always be here—and that there are things I should leave with those that will be here when I am not.
Perhaps you will be able to use some of what I have learned. I don’t believe the world you're inheriting is going to reward simple answers, and I feel a responsibility to leave my congregation with some things that might equip you for that.