Kevin East Christian Blog and Commentary

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How Would You Answer These Tough Questions?

  • Kevin East
    Kevin East is the President of the Boys & Girls Clubs of East Texas. He formerly served Pine Cove Camps as their Executive Director of Ministries. He writes at his blog, "Following to Lead". Connect… More
  • Published Mar 03, 2012

Some questions only require surface level answers.  Others cut straight to your heart, requiring you to do some soul-searching in order to come up with a solid answer.

We are all used to being in conversations.  In conversations it is natural to receive information, and also to give it.  There is nothing new about that.  Over the past year, however, there have been a few questions that I found much better than others.

Let me briefly explain. These questions have stuck with me, and bounced around in my mind over and over.  I wasn't able to give these questions easy answers.  More importantly, I didn't want to give them easy answers.  It's as if the more these questions rattled around within me, the more I learned from them.

I hope that as I share them with you, they will do just as much "damage" to you as they have done to me.

Here they are:

1. Tell me about your prayer life. Recently, I was interviewed to possibly be an elder at my church.  Among a first round of questions with me and my wife, they threw this one my way.  I realize it isn't necessarily a question, but it still required an answer.

Maybe the reason this question was so impressive to me was that it totally stripped me of the opportunity to "brag" about my spirituality.  I couldn't tell them how often I am in scripture, or how I teach my kids scripture.  It didn't allow me the opportunity to share how I love my wife, or how I seek to lead our family.

What it did leave me with was the opportunity to talk about my relationship with Christ.  Am I seeking Him?  Am I listening?  Am I honest with Him?  Such a good question to ponder.

2. How is your emotional intimacy with your wife? My good friend and retired pastor, Bob Livesay, threw this one at me one night while we were sitting in rocking chairs on my front porch.  I guess, "how is your marriage?" would have been way too easy.  This one cut to the core.

I've thought about this one often, considering if me and my wife's friendship is growing.  It's made me want to change the way I might measure the health of our marriage.  God desires us to fully enjoy a deep, intimate relationship.  It seems that too often we just settle for not arguing that much.  Not good.  I want more than that.  This question has reminded me this is something we have to fight for.

3. Why did Jesus come to this earth? The Gospel is much more than a few short verses I might have memorized back in high school.  So when my 5 year old asked me this, it required that I really think about this great news, and how even children can understand it.

Most of us can't communicate the gospel.  We might try by fumbling around through cliche' lines we remember from Sunday School as a child.  But when a child asks, those simplistic answers just don't seem to make sense anymore.

I've written a post about this before, but for you parents with young kids, I highly recommend The Jesus Storybook Bible.  Wow, it does such a great job of taking such a grand story and delivering it in bite-sized pieces.

These questions have made me really think.  For that, I'm grateful to the people that asked them.

Have you been asked any questions that you found tough to answer?

For more blog posts like this on leading, following, parenting, fostering, and family, visit Kevin's blog at www.followingtolead.com.