Questions Without Answers
the blank page, the naked heart, and God's abiding love and faithfulness
All my life I’ve had questions without answers. Some of my earliest memories are being gently reprimanded in Sunday School for asking the impossible. Where did God come from? How will eternity go on forever? Doesn’t it have to eventually have to come to an end?
I wanted to know everything. To have solid answers to every question. To know I was doing life right, that I could explain every decision I made based on substantial truth.
At some point, I realized there were questions that I couldn’t ask anyone but God and myself. I started writing them in a journal when I was five years old. I remember in vivid detail the day my older brother found my diary and marched through the living room, book in hand, reading aloud with emphatic hand gestures, “I do not know if I am in love.” My words. My heart on the page. I was mortified. When I was finally able to snatch the book away, I threw it behind my dresser, which was the only version of a black hole I understood. I never saw it again.
For fear of my heart being naked on the page and someone seeing it again, I stopped writing in journals. I drew, I wrote stories, I wrote songs, but I didn’t try my questions on the blank page.
Fast forward a decade. I was a sophomore in high school, wrestling with my identity, grieving the natural losses that come along with being the youngest in a large family, realizing that losing people was going to be a story I would have to repeat over and over in my life. I longed for things to stay the same. To suspend the happy times of my childhood and stay a girl. The thought of growing up, changing, and watching those I loved change terrified me. I had questions. And I needed a place to take them.
I went back to the blank page and poured my heart out to God. I drew near to him with words. I wrote prayers and poetry, scripture, songs, and found him responsive. Something happened in my spirit when I asked the questions that haunted me. I became stronger, braver, less lonely, more aware of God’s presence in my life. I became more myself.
Journaling became a lifeline to me. At seventeen, I met the man that I would one day marry. In the three and a half years we dated, there were so many questions, I had to switch to 33¢ composition notebooks. I wrote three lines of text in one college-ruled line in case anyone in biology class was reading over my shoulder. I wrote in code in case anyone should stumble across the words that were flooding out of my soul. I didn’t understand I was falling in love until I read it on the page.
To tell Randy how I felt, I gave him my journal to read on my last day of high school. When he came to pick me up that afternoon, he had a fat stack of papers in his pocket where he had copied in hurried handwriting passage after passage from the pages there. He wanted to read those words, as clumsy and cryptic as they were, over and over again.
For us, dating wasn’t easy. There were a lot of questions. I wrote them all, I prayed them all. I didn’t know what was going to happen. When Randy was sure he loved me, I wasn’t sure I could honestly say it back. When my heart was fully surrendered to the idea of marriage, he backed away.
We went through a bad break up. I thought it was over for good. I wrote all the questions to God in my journals, recounting all the hurtful words said, the weighing if love was even worth it, the heaviness of love lost—the greatest recurring struggle of my life. And then something shifted. There was a moment in time where the door was opening back up to a life together with this man whom I had loved so deeply and lost. I remembered the scripture that says this: Love keeps no record of wrongs. And I gathered up a stack of journals, and page by page, scanned the words. Any time something made my heart ache, made me sick at my stomach, forced me to relive things I didn’t want to remember, I ripped out the page. Page after page, journal after journal. I took them to my sister-in-law’s house, she fired up the grill, and we burned them. I collected the ashes and gave them to Randy with the handwritten scripture attached. Love keeps no record of wrongs. The jar of ashes sits on a bookshelf in our bedroom. Questions answered.
I became a mother and lost myself. I had to relearn to walk. How to move through a life that was unfamiliar and strange to me, where I was laying aside the life that had moved me in its strong current of going and doing and accomplishing and achieving. This life was different. It was slow and small, quietly turning in on itself to wrap around the life of another. There were so many questions. They came slowly, in weary moments between nursing the baby or late at night while washing the dishes before drifting into a wakeful sleep.
There were more babies and more questions. Sometimes the answers would come at the bottom of the page, as I wrote of my discontent and confusion, my exhaustion and overwhelm, the needs that never stopped. The words would eventually come around to gratitude for the beauty—the precious love, the baby smiles, the joy of having these little people in my life, the gift of wonder they bring to every experience.
Sometimes the answers came years later. How will we make it? Are we doing this right? God, how do we do this???
Some answers are still to come.
My journals have become a record of God’s faithfulness to me. Of his deep and abiding love, his goodness, his attention to the details, his absolute ability to step in at the moment of my greatest weakness and show himself strong. I feel his pleasure in the asking of these questions. And though my heart quivers on the page in the moments of not knowing, I have come to trust that truly, all questions will one day be answered.
Dear friends,
Sending love and hope for answers at just the moment you need them. I am writing this from my little office on this sunny February day, three weeks away from my due date. I have questions that are freshly scribbled in my journal, my heart quivering a bit on the page… I am looking forward to the answers that will are coming on the other side.
Thank you for your presence in my life and for reading these words week by week. It means so much to me.
Love,
Mackenzie
Family News:
Randy just released a new album on Spotify, Apple Music, and other streaming platforms. These are songs he has recorded over the last couple of years as youtube videos (so there is also a video corresponding with each song). They are real and raw, and I am so excited to finally share them with you. If you give it a listen, I would love to know which song is your favorite.
Journal With Me:
My 6-week video journaling course, Innermost Journaling: Mining the Depths of Your Sacred Everyday Life, is now available to my paid substack subscribers and Patrons.