The Process or the Answer?

We are so fixated on giving the right answer so that we don’t give the wrong answer that we don’t focus on the process, and if we don’t understand the process and work through it and refine it then we are not equipped to work through the next problem or situation.

Is this a result of our pursuit of trivia? Trivia does not demand a critical process, only a regurgitation of data.

Is this a result of insecurity and an absence of identity – are we so insecure that we dare not reveal that we may not know how to arrive at the answer?

Is it a fruit of our nanosecond culture where sustained thought fatigues us and interruptions beset us?

Is this what happens when society relies on “experts” for answers?

I would often rather have a wrong answer from someone that is the result of working through a process than a right answer that was arrived at by a shortcut. There is hope for growth in the person who worked through the process while the person who took the shortcut, who arrived at the right answer because he asked someone else, is ill equipped to negotiate the next problem on the horizon.

This is true in business, it is true in church, it is true in all of life. Business leaders who give their people the answers don’t help them, but those who coach them how to think about finding the answers serve them well. Pastors and small group leaders who do all the talking, who give people the “right” answers, interpose themselves between their people and the Biblical text thereby creating a dependency that the church should only have on God.