At the centre of every human is a question. If we dive deeper we might spot it or clothe it with words to make sense of it: Who will love me? What does my future hold? How can I feel clean?
I know it sounds trite; we've all asked some of these questions at some point in the quietness of our soul or in the darkest moments of our lives, but if we stuck all these questions in a pan and boiled them down - reducing them - if we waited long enough, we would have just the one question holding out after all the other red herrings had evaporated. We might ignore it, or we might look for it and lose it; nevertheless, it is still there steering the course of our life in pursuit of that answer, hidden under the rubble of our failures, pushing us on from the temporary successes, nagging away at us until the day we die. Whether we pursue it or run from it, it is still there like a clock ticking away with every repetition of its asking. Stuck at the most tender part of our lives, it guards the entrance to our heart, where we decide to trust or no.
So often, this self-knowledge eludes us, and like a deer in the woods quickly slips out of sight before we've even realised it's there. Life comes crowding in and the noise of all the other questions drowns out that small voice asking that one question that must be answered above all.
This question is the 'deal-maker' or the 'deal breaker': getting the answer we need, if we get a satisfactory answer to it we count ourselves in. It sits on a pile of pain and its roots go back to our past. This cannot be changed unless the question is joined with the perfect answer. But we lock it away or we think we lock it away. It's a dangerous place; it is the center of our being and can only be unlocked with trust. Yet it sends its shoots out, searching for the answer. It touchess every area of our lives, shaping, directing, eliminating pathways of choice, desperate for its mate, desperate for the answer.
