Recently, Donald Miller wrote a fantastic blog post on Why the Bible is a Tough book for Americans. I would strongly recommend reading this post if you get a chance. Shortly after reading his blog, I came across a part in a book I’m currently reading that was about asking the “why” question. After processing both of these pieces of information about asking questions, it got me thinking…

If we change how we ask a question from how to why, does it change our perspective and ultimately our answer in the end? When we ask the question “how”, we often get caught in circles becuase we leave ourselves with a huge question that most likely has no single answer. A couple examples of this are…

How did God create the world?

How did the stock market crash?

Through these examples, we often ask how? and that really doesn’t get us anywhere. You have probably at some point or another had someone ask you, “how did God create the world?” Most likely you gave a very complex answer. You might have said,  ”He did it in seven literal days”, or you could have said, “100o years is like a day to the Lord and if a day is like 1000 years then it could have been 7,000 years,”  but, in the end,  we really  don’t know. I am over analyzing this here, but you get the picture. The person you were talking to probably looked at you and said “thanks for the bible answer but I want to know how?”

If you were to take the second question, how did the stock market crash? One might answer,  ”because of peoples’ bad credit, home mortgages and job losses a local and national crash happened; therefore,  creating a world wide crash.”  I’m  saying  we change the way we ask the question altogether. Let’s transition from a “how” question to a “why” question.

Why did God create the world?

Why did the stock market crash?

By simply changing one word of the question, we are faced with an entirely different question and discussion. Why did God create the world? Because He loved us. Why did the stock market crash? Because people across the nation were over spending,  and money was given without correct checks and balances.  If we keep going down the road of “why” the answer starts to come back to us more clearly.

By changing the questions to why,  we get back to ourselves quicker. It forces us to look inside ourselves and through this our perspective is different and our role and responsibility changes.

We can see different results by simply changing how we ask the question!