You know that feeling you get when you’re trying to come up with the name of a book you read or figure out where else you’ve seen that actor? It’s a gnawing feeling. You know the answer is right there, but you just can’t bring it out. It will bug you all day if you don’t come up with it. And when you do, usually just after you’ve stopped trying, it is so satisfying.

You know that feeling? It’s going extinct. It’s being replaced, of course, with Google, with a few quick taps on a smart device and the comfort of instant gratification. We no longer need to sit in that place of uncertainty. And most of the time, that doesn’t bother me much.

I’ve just returned from a week of continuing education in San Francisco. I hadn’t been there in 12 years, but with the help of my phone, I was able to navigate the city like a native. I had directions anywhere I wanted to go. I knew the best restaurants, the coolest music venues, the latest museum exhibitions. I could see pictures of the places I was going before I got there and scope out my dinner options while I was still sitting at lunch. And any question that my friends asked, I could instantly find the answer without straining to remember. There was never a moment during the week when I didn’t know where to go or what to do, never a time when I had to venture into unknown territory or waste time wandering around uncertain.

In his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix, Edwin Friedman marvels at the expansion of information available to us today. He explains what we already know from our own lives that the amount of information available to us today is exponentially greater than that available to previous generations. And that catalog of knowledge is expanding at an accelerating rate, outpacing our ability to even capture it in meaningful ways, let alone assimilate it into our daily lives.

This deluge of information, Friedman believes, is a source of anxiety in our society. With so much knowledge available, we fear that we must master all of it before we can act. To be responsible professionals, parents, or pastors we must understand and evaluate all the options before moving forward. As he writes, “The great myth of our data-gathering era that affects leaders, parents, and healers alike…[is that] ‘If only we knew enough, we could do (or fix) anything.’”

“If only we knew enough, we could do (or fix) anything.” At times, this is how I have understood wisdom, as simply the accumulation of knowledge. When I finally learn enough, when I achieve a certain level of information, I will be wise. But Friedman sees this way of thinking as the gateway not to wisdom, but to anxiety. This thinking leads me to anxiety because, of course, I can never know enough. There is simply more information on any given subject than any of us could master or apply. So rather than being empowered by information, I become paralyzed by it. As Friedman says, I use “data as a way of avoiding the problems of maturing.” I seek knowledge over wisdom and information over formation.

So where then do wisdom and maturity come from? For him the answer lies in a spirit of adventure, a willingness to take creative risks and move confidently into the unknown, to live with uncertainty, to live with and through the unanswerable questions.

Like, “What is the I that exists?”

Sometime during my middle school years a book of Zen koans showed up on our coffee table. I’m not sure where it came from or why we had it, but I do remember reading it in utter fascination. The first koan of the collection was perhaps the most famous to non-Buddhists: what is the sound of one hand clapping? Confused, I turned the page, expecting an answer on the other side. But instead I found another question. What is the color of the wind? And on another page a story: One day a monk fell down in the snow and called out, “Help me up! Help me up!” Another monk came and lay down beside him. The first monk got up and went away.

None of these koans made any sense to me. I didn’t understand the point of asking a question to which there was no answer? Yet something continued to draw me back to that book. If these questions were nonsense, it was a pleasing kind of nonsense. They confused me in a way that felt like it was leading somewhere, slowly. Rather than rushing to give an answer, the koans forced me to sit in a space of unknowing and wonder. I had the sense that these tiny powerful teachings were meant to chew on and wrestle with over time.

When I asked Darrell about koans, he pointed me to the book Bring Me the Rhinoceros, which includes the story of a woman who spent months sitting with what seemed to me a very simple koan. It goes like this: “Someone asked Zhaozhou, ‘Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?” Zhaozhou said, ‘No.’” From the outside, that seems very straightforward to me, but the woman in the book writes, “’No’ was an incredible process for me. It took a year and a half. I kept a journal and had major dreams. Over and over again I came to my teacher and said, ‘It’s this,’ or, ‘It’s that.’ For a long time the teacher rejected my answers…” In the end, part of what she learns, she writes, is how to “rest in what I don’t know.”

The practice of the koan is the opposite of my constant Googling, the opposite of our anxious data-gathering. It is the practice of sitting with unanswered questions, of resting in what we don’t know. It is that resting which forms and matures us, that struggle with what we cannot understand that brings wisdom.

Enter Job. The Book of Job is about a man sitting with an unanswerable question, perhaps the most unanswerable of all: the question of suffering. And it’s important for me to say at the beginning that I believe it is an unanswerable question. As a minister, I am often asked why bad things happen. And when you ask it, I feel an anxious need to have an answer. I want to have an answer both because I hope it will relieve your suffering and because I want you to think I’m wise, or at least smart. And many people believe they have found answers for the question of suffering. Many believe they have found those answers in Job. Solid, knowable answers. But with all the answers I have heard, I’ve never found one that was very convincing, and over time I have come to believe that’s not what Job is about. I’ve come to believe that, rather than answers, the book provides a kind of koan, a chance to be formed by the unanswerable.

In fact, most of Job is about the suffering man poking holes in the answers of his friends. As Job sits with the question of suffering, all of their traditional ways of explaining the experience appear obviously false. But no better answer takes their place. And finally Job is left to rail at God, as many of us may have. Why this pain? Why this suffering? Why this uncertainty?

But when the divine responds, it is with questions, not answers. “Have you ever commanded morning or guided dawn to its place to hold the corners of the sky and shake off the last stars? Have you walked through the depths of the ocean or dived to the floor of the sea?”

For a long time I’ve read this questioning as a power play by God, an attempt to put Job back in his place. God’s questions sounded like, “What do you know? Who are you to question me?” But now I hear them not as “Who do you think you are,” but something more like “Who is the I that exists?” God’s questions force Job to dig deeper into his experience, to recognize the depth of mystery in which he exists, to open and let go. As the questions multiply and overwhelm him, Job begins to understand that he could never possess the knowledge it would take to grasp the answers. Instead he will have to sit in his unknowing, to act without having all the information. To move and mature through suffering, without ever comprehending the why. God’s questions force Job to let go of his desire to master the situation through understanding and instead grasp the wisdom that can be found in uncertainty.

If you were to have read my search history in December 2014, you would have thought I was stalking someone named “Nola Grace.” It would have read something like this “Nola Grace,” “Nola meaning,” “Nola etymology,” “Nola Grace Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, images,” “Nola accordion song,” “Nola Grace anagram.” And let me just say that when you’re a minister and you find out that your unborn child’s name anagrams to the Italian for archangel during advent when you’re reading all the passages about Gabriel talking to Mary, it is totally trippy.

These were in the weeks when we had been told by doctors that our daughter wasn’t going to make it to birth. But as soon as we had chosen her name, I got on Google and started searching. I didn’t really know why I was doing it, but now I think that instinctively I was trying to get some control of the situation by learning as much as I could. I was unconsciously trying to find something in all of those searches that could save my daughter or comfort me. In my magical thinking, I hoped that if I could just learn enough about the name we had given her, I would know what to do and how to act in this painfully uncertain time. But of course I couldn’t. Instead, I had to sit in that uncertainty and allow it to teach me wisdom. And, as often happens, that teacher came in the person of a UCG member.

Several weeks after my furious Google searching, when Nola Grace was still holding on, Rachelle was admitted to the hospital on bedrest. And on one of our first days there, Christophe Seubert, who is a neuroanesthesiologist, came to visit on his shift. He said he wanted to put a human face on the hospital.

From then on, from time to time, he would stop by with a book for Rachelle to read, or an encouraging word, or a song he thought might speak to us in that moment. On one those visits it was “The Great Unknown.” He played it for us on his cell phone, and, as rarely happens in everyday life, the three of us were completely silent. For four minutes and seven seconds. The only other sound in the room was the monitor playing the heartbeat of our tiny unknown. I remember goose bumps and tears, and that song became the soundtrack of the next year.

Most of what wisdom I have, I got at Shands, listening and waiting in uncertainty. The sound of the great unknown is an unanswerable mystery. It can be an uncomfortable sound, with nothing to Google, no way to dispense with the anxiety of unknowing and get back on solid footing. And that’s scary, but if we will allow it, it can also be freeing. If we will learn from the uncertainty, we will gain, not anxious, ever-shifting knowledge, but wisdom that allows us to act with peace in the face of mystery, which allows us to hear the beautiful sound of one hand clapping, to see the colors of the wind, and listen to the music of the great unknown, singing even in our suffering.