Apt Questions

I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
     —RUDYARD KIPLING, The Elephant Child

What do you think of Kipling’s assertion about the critical importance of questions? Another way to ask this question (about questions) is this … is there anything worth knowing that does not answer a question?

I would say no. Even a truth you might judge unworthy of knowing, will answer a question. For example: “-40 degrees” answers this question, “At what temperature are Celsius and Fahrenheit equal?” I personally find that an interesting question, though I will likely have forgotten the answer in a week’s time. Others, like my wife, would say this is a useless piece of information. I could hardly disagree.

It is the importance we attach to the question a truth answers, that determines whether or not we care to know that truth.

I was once invited by some university students to accompany them to a taping of The Late Show with David Letterman in Chicago. As we waited in line, four people with megaphones approached and started blaring out the answer to the question, “How can you go to heaven instead of hell when you die?”

Is that an important question? I would say it is the most important question any of us ever face. The problem was, few in that line were inclined to ask that question at that particular time and as the spectacle continued they were even less willing to even think about it. Any communicator with an important, life changing truth to convey must first consider, “What question in the listener’s mind does this truth answer?” and, “How can I frame that question in a manner which will persuade the listener to consider my answer?”

Back to standing in line for the David Letterman show. How could those well-meaning and indeed brave evangelists have been more effective in that situation? Not easy. Pass out tracts, perhaps? Hmm … maybe, if they were cleverly written with Letterman-type humor. Or maybe they could have stepped into different places in line and struck up individual conversations utilizing probing questions, questions leading to hearing people’s thoughts, opening the possibility of sharing their own. It might have been difficult to find people willing to enter into conversation, but, we waited in that line a long time.

If a conversation (or presentation) about one’s eternal destiny is going to have an impact, Kipling’s “honest serving men” have to figure in somewhere. There is so much to know in this world, none of us has time for anything that doesn’t answer an intriguing question. Sometimes all we need is to have a question reframed in a way that leaves us searching. In the words of U2’s Bono, “We thought that we had the answers, it was the questions we had wrong.” (11 O’Clock Tick Tock, from Under A Blood Red Sky, 1983)

by David G. Goodman

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