The $64,000 Question

Friday was a busy and diverse day... A morning spent hearing about and discussing the work of the Irish Churches Peace Project, an afternoon plotting and planning for the next 4 Corners Festival, then an evening at a fundraising Quiz for my son's gap year project... with a pastoral visit and some sermon preparation squeezed into the gaps...
I enjoy quizzes... I enjoy the challenge of fishing around in the murky swamp that I call my memory to see if I can fish out the right answers to obscure questions... And so long as the subjects have nothing to do with modern culture (eg. soaps/celebrities/boy bands etc) I am usually OK... But on Friday night I wasn't trying to answer the questions... I was merely the beauteous assistant to our question master, having contributed a few of the questions to the pot from which he drew...
And that is a useful metaphor for what I am increasingly trying to do these days... ask questions rather than necessarily provide answers...
Earlier in the day at the ICPP event someone claimed to quote G.K. Chesterton in saying:
"It is better to be unhappy with the right questions than happy with the wrong answers."
I don't know if it actually was a Chesterton quote,as I haven't been able to source it anywhere, but it sounds like the sort of thing he would say... (If you know the real origin, please put your answers on an electronic postcard to me...)
Carrying on from yesterday's post...
Happiness is when people are unhappy with glib and patently wrong answers and start to ask different, more searching questions...
About parades... flags... dealing with the past...
About education... social welfare... health policy...
About global conflicts... poverty... the environment...
 
About everything...
 
(ps. Big thankyou to all those who contributed to Owain's gap year fundraising... the total raised since Friday night was, at the time of writing exactly £1000 - not quite $64,000, but not bad all the same.)
 
Shalom

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