Before I was a minister or a youth leader, I was a teenager trying my best to live out my faith, carrying a quiet question: if I followed Christ and kept doing good, would my life be fruitful? Would the good I did come back to me? Would faithfulness look like a life that visibly worked, one people could point to and call blessed? 

The theology handed to me answered yes, plainly. It was a kind of contract with God, the sort Will Eisner wrote about in A Contract with God. I do my part, God does God's, and the good life follows. That answer was meant to reassure me, and for a long time it did.

The question I couldn’t shake

Then I lived a good deal of life, and the contract did not hold the way I was promised. 

Doing good did not guarantee a fruitful life. Good people suffered. I learned there is no such thing as a black-and-white answer to living out our faith. There are grays of shade: the uncertainties we carry, the places where faith is real but not resolved. I still sit in one of them. Theodicy, theologians call it, is the question of why a good and loving God allows the righteous to suffer. I believe in that good God, and I have known good people to suffer, and I have not fully reconciled the two. 

Now, more than ever, I believe our work as youth leaders is to help teenagers make sense of the grays of shade instead of pretending they are not there.

That is exactly what FYI’s newly refreshed Can I Ask That? curriculum makes room for. For a decade, Can I Ask That? has empowered youth leaders to start conversations about hard questions and lead students toward discovering their own faith convictions. Now, you can get these popular discussion-based lesson guides in digital format, re-envisioned for ministry with today’s teenagers. They give us a way to explore the challenging, even controversial questions that come with teenagers living out their faith, and to do it together rather than from a distance.

 

Faith still moving in the dark 

Scripture is not afraid of this kind of exploration. Long before our teenagers started asking hard questions, Job did. He had lost nearly everything, and he brought his case directly to God. In Job 23, he says he goes forward, but God is not there; backward, but he cannot perceive God. He is looking. He is not finding. And he keeps walking anyway.

That is not faithlessness. It is faith still moving in the dark.

I think about Job every time a teenager asks me a question for which there is no clear answer. Does God approve of violence? How do I follow a God who lets people do terrible things in his name? These are not the questions of a teenager on their way out. They are the questions of a young person leaning in, asking to stay in the text without pretending the hard parts are not there. The question underneath is usually this: Can I bring my whole self, doubts and all, and still belong here?

When a teenager brings us a question like that, our instinct is to answer. To settle it. To defend God's reputation before the conversation gets uncomfortable. But I have come to believe our calling is different and more nuanced. We are not called to resolve the question. We are called to sojourn with it.

Sojourn is the word I keep returning to. 

Not resolve, not fix, not equip. 

Sojourn. 

As both a Can I Ask That? writer and user, I am not handing teenagers an answer. I am walking with them through a text that refuses to be rushed. The curriculum sessions are an invitation to slow down, read closely, and sit in the tension long enough to hear what God might be revealing. The goal was never the landing. The goal is the integrity of the journey there.

Job holds this tension for us in a way that should give us courage. When God finally answers Job out of the whirlwind (Job 38), Job does not receive a reason for his suffering—he receives an encounter. God responds with a challenge, not an explanation; presence, not a tidy resolution. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? God does not explain the suffering, but God does answer the sufferer. By the end, Job can say he had heard of God with his ears, but now his eyes see him (Job 42:5). His understanding did not change because he won the argument. It changed because the God he could not find had answered him.

Hold that tension with me, because it is the whole thing: God invites our questions. God does not always answer us the way we ask. And yet conviction still comes, not through resolution but through encounter. 

When we stay in that gap with our teenagers, we introduce them to a God big enough to be asked.
 

Sojourning, not solving

There is one more thing Job teaches us, and it is worth sitting with. When the story closes, God says it is the friends, not Job, who have not spoken rightly of him (Job 42:7). They came with tidy theology, sure they could account for Job's suffering. What they missed was not the desire to defend God, but the humility to admit their theology could not explain it. They rushed to a conclusion when Job needed a witness. It is worth asking ourselves, honestly, whether we lead more like Job or more like his friends.

Part of sojourning well is admitting that where we stand shapes what we see. A teenager reading a passage about violence through the lens of their own neighborhood will notice things a comfortable reader never will. This is not a problem to correct. Our perspectives and experience impact what we see, and God meets us in that reading, not in spite of it.

Leading this way asks more of our presence than our expertise. It can look as ordinary as:

• reading a passage slowly before we rush to explain it.
• letting a teenager say the uncomfortable part out loud without flinching.
• letting the questions that have no answer simply stand.
• admitting when we do not know an answer.
• inviting students to the true work: “Let's keep walking with this, together.”

Together. No teenager should sojourn through their hardest questions alone, and no leader needs all the answers to walk beside them.

So the next time a teenager brings us a question we cannot answer, we can take a breath. We are standing on holy ground. We do not have to rush to the landing.

We can sojourn.

Tackle teenagers’ tough questions with confidence and care

Get FYI’s popular discussion-based lesson guides re-released in a fresh new format for ministry with today’s teenagers. Flexible for groups of any size, each session features new material guaranteed to get teenagers thinking, talking, and living out their faith. Choose and download individual sessions to create your own curriculum series based on the questions your students are asking. 

Shop Now