DIFFERENT SIZED QUESTIONS

Last week, while the country slipped into toilet-roll consuming panic, I had two medium sized questions to deal with.

What I mean by a medium-sized question is a question that’s difficult to answer, but not out of reach. I often get a feeling that an MSQ is solvable, even if I haven’t reached the solution yet. It’s not a small question: you can bat those away without going away to think about it. And it’s not a huge question either. It’s chunky but there’s at least an end to it.

Part of the trouble with modern life is that we can’t seem to make up our minds about the difference. Newsreaders looking for a sound bite, or a simple yes/no answer, hammer the point, badgering their guests into answering huge questions as though they were simple, small ones.

Meanwhile, old-fashioned debate, the stuff that could possibly help us get to the bottom of medium sized questions, is always time-limited and sprinkled with bias. And I hate to say it, but social media has only made that condition worse.

What’s more, it’s given us all a voice, of all things! We all have the same platforms to be published experts on everything - and an equal number of cathedral doors on which to nail our reformative theses! Huge questions then become paper-mulch in online-Wittenberg, where hundreds of thousands of Martin Luthers are having their daily scraps with each other. It’s a noisy town square to say the least.

My two MSQs last week were sort of solved. Not just by me. One friend, who’d asked me what a tricky bit of the Bible was about, reached a conclusion that seemed pretty sensible for both of us. Another, who’d found something even more difficult, did a bit of research too, and that was that. All I did was ask her a small question, hoping that it might unlock the medium size one.

I thought about that today, because I wondered whether huge questions might be tools to help us solve smaller questions too. The Pastor told the story of a Bible character called Hosea, a man who was required to do a life-changing thing to make a massive, much wider point.

If I were focused on the small question Hosea might have had: “Whom should I marry?” I might miss the picture, which is in this case, that marriage fits itself into a broader story, and a thing that carries a huge question for old Hosea: “What does my marriage say to the whole nation?” or bigger still perhaps, “Will I be obedient?”

I think huge questions are sometimes unsolvable. That’s okay: in mathematics, infinity and imaginary numbers are just tools you can use to solve real equations with things like ‘electrical resistance’ or ‘frequency waves’ in them. Somewhere along the line, the incalculable numbers cancel each other out and only the tangible, real stuff remains.

Huge questions too. We’re not going to solve them, but the art of looking at them, from so many different directions... that leads us to some awesome perspectives and principles when it comes to those smaller ones we just might be able to solve.

And no, I don’t understand why people panic-bought all the toilet roll last week. There was always going to be enough, for the pragmatic buyer and the stockpiler alike. And now, because of the perception that there wouldn’t be enough of it when there actually was, there now actually isn’t when there should be. But normal human behaviour during a sweeping global pandemic? Well that is a huge question, if you ask me.