Day 9: On Questioning

In my classroom, I keep a question box on the bookshelf. My students know to write down any unanswered questions (from class, from church...anything remotely related to the subject of God/religion/Bible) on a slip of paper and drop it into the box. Before the next time I see them, I write an answer in return. The purpose of the box is two-fold, the first of which being that I can redirect tangential but important questions to the box and therefore stay on-task during a lesson. More importantly, though, the box is my chance to interact individually and directly with my students by responding to the deep spiritual questions that many of them harbor. I love engaging my students' real questions--I love that they are willing to ask difficult things and I love both the challenge and the ministry of answering.

Here's an example from today:

"How do we know God is real when so many other religions could be right, and [how do we know] there can be only one religion that can be right because if there was several, someone in the Bible like Joseph would write in the Bible, 'it is not just one religion that's right, there are millions that are right.' PS-I need this answer as soon as possible."

Y'all, my kids are asking this kind of stuff! 10 years old and thinking about inter-religious issues! That gives me such great hope for these children as individuals and as a generation of (faith) leaders. The boy who asked this question will not be content to let anyone else dictate what it is he is going to believe or support or rally behind. He wants to know why for himself.

My goal of nurturing critical thinkers is one of the things that I am most sure about in my teaching (with my older students particularly). If my students leave my classroom with nothing else, I want them to feel emboldened to ask deep questions--of the Bible, of religious tradition, of themselves.

What a deeply sacred thing I am privileged to be a part of as my student seeks an answer to this question My prayer is that I might answer faithfully. So, what would you say to him?

----

Then, of course, I do get the occasional question that reads more like this:

"Hi, ok next week can we watch the rest of the movie and where do you buy your clothes?"