BELIEF: Making room for uncertainty

I grew up in a Christian tradition that valued certainty. The Bible was true, its meaning could be known, and on many of life’s difficult questions there was a right answer and a wrong one.

As I’ve gotten older, my faith hasn’t disappeared, but my comfort with certainty has.

I’ve learned that sincere, thoughtful people can read the same biblical passage and reach very different conclusions. Sometimes that’s because we bring different experiences to the text. Sometimes ancient language, history and culture are complicated. And sometimes Scripture itself preserves different voices and perspectives.

LGBTQ+ issues have certainly exposed some of those differences. Christians who take Scripture seriously have reached very different conclusions about sexuality, gender, marriage and what faithful living requires.

I wonder what might happen if our first response to those differences were curiosity rather than certainty.

What led someone to understand Scripture differently than I do? What might they see that I don’t? Can I listen without surrendering my own convictions? Can I leave room for the possibility that I don’t understand everything perfectly?

These are questions I’ve been spending a great deal of time with lately, both personally and in my work with PFLAG. I’ve come to believe that some of our most worthwhile conversations begin not when we are certain we have the answer, but when we become genuinely curious about how someone else arrived at theirs.

We don’t have to agree to listen to one another.

But we might be surprised by what happens when we do.

JEFF WICKHAM

President, PFLAG Coeur d’Alene/Kootenai County