We need not be in such a hurry to race to the answer. We need to allow some time on this side of it – to feel not the abrupt silence after the answer but the pregnant one before. To linger in the question, to hold it, to turn it side to side, end on end, to catch the light on the question’s many angles, to see it reflected in each person’s perspective, through each person’s eyes, to spend a whole evening pushed back from the table, watching the light of truth bounce off all its many faces, is to follow, as a king would follow, the glory of the quest.

Answers are as alive as questions; they grow with experience. The answer is the beginning and the middle as much as it is the end. If Jesus is the answer, then he is to be experience anew, afresh, in each of our lives – in our doubts, in our dreams, in our questions, and in the silence that sometimes is the only real answer that can follow.

Three simple words that will ruin any conversation: “I know that.” When my daughter was in grade school, this was her favorite phrase. I can remember testing her on her homework, correcting her incorrect attempt, and she would come over and look at the word on the paper to be sure I was right, and then she’d say, “I know that.”

Most people get better at this technique as they grow older. The word need not be said; the effect is known and felt by everyone. It’s a downward look from an upturned face, or the wrenching of a body backward after depositing the weight of a heavy verdict, or merely the stiffening of a neck, but it’s still said, plainly and clearly, through an impregnable wall: “I know that; I read that book; I know how it turns out.”

It is impossible to share a discovery, to give a version of a story or a possible solution to a problem, to bring out one’s humble treasure in front of such a person without being crushed.

I wonder how much crushing I’ve done in my life. How many times have I assumed people knew nothing about the truth while I knew everything? How many times have I shut the door on someone else’s search? How much of this beautiful interplay of light and faces have I missed, waiting to close the curtain on my final act… to close, and not to open?

If it is the glory of God to conceal a matter and the glory of kings to find it out, then to resolve a matter, to shut a door, to end a discussion, to win an argument, to crush a child’s first try must be the glory of fools.