God's the answer. What's the question?

[Built To Last]

A fascinating excerpt from a book by Biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann:

Can a person be open to the future that stretches out ahead?

Each person yearns to be free enough to be open and honest in each new encounter. In spite of this longing for truth in the inward being, however, each person feels that his or her life lacks the integrity, authenticity, and fulfillment that belong to its true nature. The creature begins therefore with a deep sense of emptiness. Each person wants authentic existence, but each refuses to believe that such comes only as a gift from God, as a reprieve from self. Each tries to secure authentic life by human efforts, not realizing that self-assertiveness always ends in self-deception and doubt.

This self-reliant, self-assertive spirit manifests itself in many ways, religious as well as secular. To attain to oneness with the cosmos, some preform sedulous religious duties as a form of self-aggrandizement, and become self-righteous and alienated from the self and others. Others labor for recognition, cash, authority, children, and power only to find that in truth they are working solely against a sense of personal inadequacy. One's best efforts fail to secure what one wants, precisely because they are efforts, premeditated and self-conscious.

The authentic existence one searches for is as elusive as the end of a rainbow. Yet each is also unable to accept life from God because God is out of one's control. To enjoy freedom the individual would have to surrender autonomy, but that risk is too great. Fear and anxiety attend this fruitless search. The more insecure one is, the more one turns in on himself or herself; the more on turns in on the self, the more insecure one is. Humanity is trapped, unable to break out of this vicious circle.

This tangled web over the human is cut through only with the proclamation of the word of God, or rather, the question of God. God's grace comes to the individual, but not to support efforts at regularizing the future; God's grace comes as a question:

"Will you surrender, utterly surrender, to God's dealing?"