A few years ago I attended a men’s retreat in Colorado that turned out to be a turning point for me.
I and a couple friends who went together were assigned to a small “breakout” group to discuss our take-aways from the speaker’s message, which happened to be on the story of Samson (Judges 16 in the Bible). The speaker finished after an hour or so, and it was breakout time. We pulled our metal folding chairs into a lopsided circle next to a window that looked at on the snow falling through the trees. Around the circle the discussion went, each guy talking about what they got from the message. As my turn drew closer my hands got clammy. I did get something out of the message, but I couldn’t possibly share what was on my mind. No way. What I had to say was at least three kinds of crazy.
“So, Kevin, you’ve been quiet. What did you get out of it?” Tony, our group leader, nodded and all eyes were on me. I squirmed, but figured I should just come out with it. There was no way out. I searched my mental catalog for some easy, men’s retreat kind of response, but nothing came.
“Well, I got hung up about halfway through the message, somewhere after Samson took up with a whore, but before everyone in the building was crushed to death.”
Blank stares. One guy kind of chuckled, but I think because I had said “whore.”
Tony: “Ooookay. So, what hung you up about that?”
“Uh,” I looked around at the already concerned guys to my left and right, “well, honestly, it bothers me that God empowered Samson to take his own life in an act of revenge, all because his eyes had been gouged out. He was basically a suicide bomber if you think about it. And God approved of it because he gave him the strength to do it. So does that mean suicide is OK in some circumstances? I mean, what do you do with that?”
I tried to take the edge off the question with a nervous laugh.
Long pause. I look around. Several guys’ jaws hang out. My friends shake their heads. I imagine they are thinking, “We should’ve asked Derek to come with us instead. At least he’s sane.”
The question hung in space for the next ten minutes. No one really attempted to answer it, but I knew I had dug up something and it terrified me on the one hand because it challenged a belief that I had always held. But it was liberating at the same time because there really was no answer. And no matter what I thought, the truth was evident in black and white on the printed page.
My point isn’t about suicide or how to interpret the Samson story. My point is really about discovering.
I’ve said before that writing isn’t as much about making something new as it is uncovering existing truth and then communicating it to the world in your unique voice. But that’s precisely where things get messy, because you must be willing to accept the truth, the whole truth, questions and all, and not just the pretty bits. You see, the truth that we set out to uncover rarely looks like what we expected or hoped for. In fact, the difference can usually be better described as horrifying, dangerous, wild. It’s shocking and liberating, terrible and wonderful all at once.
But don’t fooled about what you’re getting into. History has a name for people who uncover such things and simply won’t shut up about it: heretics. But, sometime later, usually long after they’ve been burned at the stake (or nailed to a tree) a few people will begin to see that not all of the heretics were crazy. They see that some of them had been given a gift. Some of them had been allowed to see things as they really are. Some of them were…right. Turns out, they weren’t heretics at all. We simply couldn’t see the truth because we were in the way.
In the years since that retreat I’ve written a couple short stories that explore the very questions I asked that day and just couldn’t seem to shake. I couldn’t have known that my crazy questions would eventually help strengthen a friend’s brittle faith. I couldn’t have known that our family would be personally devastated by the pain of suicide and that I would see some things through different eyes forever. I couldn’t have known that one single idea would set me on a course of discovery that is still shaping my life today.
Listen, all of life is a mystery that cannot be fully figured out, explained or even wholly experienced in this skin. Period. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something. It is good enough to pursue the mystery. Creativity, motivation, the drive to simply discover–these are all great gifts. Do not be afraid to go out on a limb with your writing. Explore really tough questions, even the ones that probably don’t have answers. If you’re asking questions you already know the answers to, you’re not asking big enough questions.
So, go wrestle with big questions, write the best stuff you can, and whatever you do be honest.