According to Myers-Briggs personality tests, I’m a strong “N.” One of the traits of us Ns is to love starting things and then let them fade away rather than pay proper attention to completing them. So I’ve been having trouble knowing how to end this well.
I’ve decided I’ll wrap this up with an idea that I’ve been playing with along the way, and that is to encourage you to help make something new happen by asking a dangerous question – the kind of question that lets the horses out of the barn. One of the reasons that I’ve hesitated with this idea until now is that I’m not entirely sure that I’ll come up with enough examples or description of what I mean so that you’ll get a glimpse of the kind of question that might be just right for you. And I think each of us would benefit from asking very different kinds of questions to different people.
So here are some ideas that come to mind:
Ask a Christian friend: “What would church look like if we made it up from scratch?” or the even more radical “If I wanted to get toegther with other Christians in a way that enabled us to encourage each other to live in the best way possible, what might that look like?”
Ask a spouse: “Are we actually living the kind of life that we want to be living – the kind of life we really believe God would want us to be living? What major thing is missing or would we like to do way more of”
Ask an acquaintance or friend who is not a Christian: “What do you see when you look at Christians (including me)? What do you think Christians should do differently?”
Ask an older person: “What do you wish you would have thought more about or done differently when you were my age?”
Ask God: “Please show me clearly any ways that you would like me to live differently. Help me be the kind of person who lives a good and true life.”
Ask a friend: “How could we get together more often in a way that was more intentional? Is there something we do together as a weekly kind of thing”
No, I’m not great at asking these kinds of questions, but there have been times when I’ve asked something like one of these or been asked. And big things have happened as a result. One of them was when my brother and I realised we had similar dreams and one of us (I don’t remember who) said, “So why don’t we do it.” We did and I ended up in New Brunswick as a result.
