Questions, Questions...I've Got Questions

3,298...

If this were Jeopardy, the category would be titled “Biblical numbers”. The answer would be “What is the number of questions found in the King James Version of the Bible?”

3,298 questions...

The Book of Job is the stand out winner in the question contest with 329. (Surprise, surprise!) Jeremiah has 195 questions, Isaiah, 190, Psalms, 163, 1 Samuel, 157, and Genesis, 149. The gospels contain 630 questions, with Matthew the winner at 177, followed by John at 167, Luke close behind at 165 and Mark trailing with 121.*

Depending on the translation and whether you include the apocryphal/deuterocanonical books in your count, the total number of questions in the Bible may vary, but there is no getting away from the fact that questions and questioning are very biblical. Some of the questions are voiced by the writer of a particular book, others come from the mouth of God, the Yahweh of the Old Testament, the Jesus of the New. It would appear that it is fine with God that we ask Him questions, but it is also expected that we should be fine with God asking us questions as well. Read any of the chapters at the end of the Book of Job. God asks a head-spinning number of questions of Job, more than the many questions that Job had asked God in the early chapters of the book. Just count the question marks in Chapter 36, then count the question marks in Chapters 6 and 7. Lots of questions. Fortunately for Job, this mutual questioning ends well. God takes issue with the way Job's friends spoke about God, but God appears to be fine with all of Job's questioning, saying to Job's friends, “And my servant Job shall pray for you, for I will accept his prayer not to deal with you according to your folly. For you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.” (Job 42:8b) Job gets a shout out from the Lord God Himself despite his questioning or, perhaps, because of his questioning. Good news for us as well as for Job: Questioning, if done correctly – face-to-face, before God and toward God – counts as prayer.**

This strange Lenten series has been about asking questions in a Luddite-like manner. The basic questions have been focused on what we let into our lives in the way of technology or even just “stuff” that clutters up our closets or our minds. Some of these questions were: For each new technology - “machine” - we let into our lives, are we losing something valuable, something of quality that the “old way” of doing it provided? How can this loss be avoided? When we can't live without the new technology, how do we decide to adapt, to use it in a way that does not diminish our lives and relationships? To what extent are we in danger of growing “mechanical in head and in heart, as well as hand”? And then there is my favorite question: “Will the Kingdom of God be any closer to existing on earth as it is in heaven if I have this tool?” These questions apply to our specific life style choices, but they also hone our skills at asking more complex questions and give us a new comfort level with the process of asking and answering questions on an ongoing deeper spiritual level. So as I end this Lenten Luddite series, I encourage us to take our questions to the next level, to realize that all our questions can be turned into Job-like prayer, sometimes maybe even without the pain and angst. All our questions are better questions when we direct them toward God.

Lord, how much screen time is too much?

Lord, do I really need another book, a new phone? No to the book, yes to phone? I kind of wanted it the other way around.

Lord, what can I do to simplify my life?

What are You calling me to let go of?

What or who are you calling me to connect to?

Lord, where am I going to get the relational energy to connect with all the people you put in my life each day? Did you forget I'm an introvert? Oh, right, you made me that way. You'll l give me all I need to pull it off? Of course. Thanks for the reminder. I'm glad I asked...

*The numbers come from J.L. Hancock's book All the Questions in the Bible as mentioned in Beth Moore's study The Quest.

**I've used the following passage from Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering by Timothy Keller in my devotional blog posts twice before. Here it is for a third time. Yeah, it's that good, and Job's questions are part of the mix of the doubts and complaints and the yelling and screaming Keller talks about:

But why would God be so affirming of Job? Job cursed the day he was born, challenged God's wisdom, cried out and complained bitterly, expressed deep doubts. It didn't seem that Job was a paragon of steady faith throughout. Why would God vindicate him like that?' The first reason is that God is gracious and forgiving. But the crucial thing to notice is this: Through it all, Job never stopped praying. Yes, he complained, but he complained to God. He doubted, but he doubted to God. He screamed and yelled, but he did it in God's presence. No matter how much in agony he was, he continued to address God. He kept seeking him. And in the end, God said Job triumphed. How wonderful that our God sees the grief and anger and questioning, and is still willing to say “you triumphed” - not because it was all fine, not because Job's heart and motives were always right, but because Job's doggedness in seeking the face and presence of God meant that the suffering did not drive him away from God but toward him. And that made all the difference. As John Newton said, if we are not getting much out of going to God in prayer, we will certainly get nothing out of staying away.

 

Human Connection in a Kiosk World

My husband and I frequent fast food restaurants on an embarrassingly regular basis. Post pandemic, with the rapid rise of ordering kiosks, it has become more and more difficult to order from a person at a register and pay cash for our lunch. We have found that at certain times of the day, if we hang around the register looking like hungry people of a certain age, someone will appear from the kitchen area and take our order the old fashioned way. Since we are regulars at one McDonald's, we tend to see the same young girl emerge from the kitchen to help us. On one visit, after an ordering glitch on the counter register, my husband teased her and said he bet she was wishing we had used the kiosk. She looked at us wide-eyed, slowly shook her head and silently mouthed the word “No!” We all laughed, finished the order and we went on to our table, she back to the kitchen. My husband and I spent lunch speculating on what her emphatic “No!” meant. Had we saved her from some unpleasant task in the kitchen? Did kiosk ordering create more problems behind the scenes than a register order? Or perhaps the very existence of her job depended upon people such as us, hanging around the register looking hungry and kiosk-avoidant.

My husband attends a men's group at another McDonald's where only kiosk ordering is available at the early morning hour they meet. Since he usually orders only coffee, he balks at ordering on the kiosk and paying for one coffee with a credit card. He instead goes through the drive-thru, orders his coffee, talks to a real person who accepts his cash and hands him his coffee. At that hour, the drive-thru is a well-oiled machine and the employees are still fresh on their shifts, and are friendly and happy to serve. My husband then parks his car and carries his coffee inside the restaurant to meet up with his group that has ordered their breakfasts via the kiosk, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.

These are just two examples of the last remnants of people-to-people connections that we used to take for granted. True, we probably didn't have meaningful in-depth conversations when ordering past Shamrock Shakes, but we did interact with a real person. Self-checkouts at the library have eliminated the interesting conversations I used to have with the desk clerks about books they read and recommended or questions they had about books I was checking out - “Oh, I read her other book. It was a great read!” “You fly fish!!!??” “I think we just got a new book in you might like.” Self-checkouts at the supermarket and ordering apps on phones also have diminished the number of times a weeks we physically interact with others.

Part of the original Luddite rebellion was due to the fact that the mill owners lost sight of the people they employed, ignoring their concerns and their needs. The Luddite weavers were used to an apprentice-style learning model where people would come alongside others to teach and model what a skilled craftsman should do to produce a quality product. The mill owners were interested mainly in rapid production and cheap overhead and would hire those who could work fast but not necessarily work precisely. They looked at the product rather than the producer. What are some of the Luddite-like questions we need to ask today, when faced with a kiosk, an app, a self-checkout? What are we losing in simple human interaction in this machine-dominated workplace? What are some things we can do to not lose the connection we as human beings are meant to have with each other, even if they are just fleeting moments in our day? To return to Thomas Carlyle's quote from my first post in this series, how have we “grown mechanical in head and in heart, as well as in hand?” What choices can we make to change that?

Despite being people of a certain age, my husband and I do, in fact, know how to use an ordering kiosk, a self-serve checkout and the scanners at the library. And, as both of us are high on the introvert scale, it is easy for us to be tempted on some days to avoid the human interaction. The machines around us allow us that option, but it doesn't mean it's good for us. We can choose the traditional checkout, even when they are few and far between. We can interact with librarians and store clerks. We can choose to spend more time looking at people's faces than looking at our screens. We were created to know one another, to interact with the people around us. Some we are called to know in depth, to really know. Others we connect with oh so briefly and superficially, but we are called to that as well. At best we do it all imperfectly, but we were made to do it, to look each other in the eye, to smile, to exchange pleasantries, and on occasion, to shake our heads slowly and mouth an emphatic “No!”