Your questions are more important than your answers.

The unexamined life is not worth living, Socrates supposedly said, and, I'll add, the unquestioned faith is not worth having. Don't seek easy, pat answers to difficult questions, and don't hide your faith up on a high, high shelf, like a fragile, porcelain figurine, where it will never even be faced with the threat of being broken. No, expose it to the wild, untamed, and unapologetic elements, and let them batter it until it is tattered and full of holes. What is left, consider holy, and keep, and then expose it, again and again, until only what can't be shaken remains.

Too many of us seek the easy path of simple, scripted answers, and run to apologetics books and websites each time we encounter a contradiction. I say, stand in the presence of the contradiction, until only the un-contradictable remains! What can be contradicted must be contradicted, and what cannot be should be held on to. You'll never know what to hold on to, though, unless you look the difficult questions squarely in the eye and say, "Do your worst!"

The great contemplative, Thomas Merton, has said:

"We too often forget that faith is a matter of questioning and struggle before it becomes one of certitude and peace. You have to doubt and reject everything else in order to believe firmly in Christ, and after you have begun to believe, your faith itself must be tested and purified. Christianity is not merely a set of forgone conclusions. Faith tends to be defeated by the burning presence of God in mystery, and seeks refuge from him, flying to comfortable social forms and safe convictions in which purification is no longer an inner battle but a matter of outward gesture."

I say again, your questions are more important than your answers. - Jeff Turner