Live The Questions – Hayden Hobby – Oct 27, 2025

A message from a Richmond Hill community member on how they see it from up on the hill as we seek God’s transformation of Metropolitan Richmond through prayer, hospitality, racial healing, and spiritual development.

I still remember the beautiful day when my wife and I were hiking a portion of the Buttermilk Trail here in Richmond, Virginia. I was in the process of reconstructing my understanding of God and my identity as a Christian after a lot of deconstruction years earlier, and was externally processing some of my theological questions as we hiked. Elena offered no answers to my questions, but instead offered me an invitation of much greater value; an invitation offered to her by an influential professor in college. She said, “I think you need to live the questions…”

“What does that mean??” I replied.

“I’m not sure I can explain it,” she said, “but I believe it’s what you need to do right now.”

I sometimes wonder if she truly knew how right she was in that moment, or how profound an effect “living the questions” would have on my growth and development as a person. It was two or three years before I even began to realize the shift that was happening inside of me as a result of living the questions, and another year before I realized that this shift was actually the answer to many of my questions…

Living and embodying our deepest questions about God, faith, and the universe requires an uncomfortable proximity to ambiguity and paradox. For example, how do you reconcile the retributive violence of the cross as a means of salvation with a God characterized in Jesus by self-emptying and unconditional forgiveness?

Attempting to answer questions like this in our typically dualistic “this or that,” “yes or no,” “black or white” fashion is apt to give any normal person a migraine. Truly living the questions requires a shift from dualistic thinking to integrated or “oneness” thinking – a practice that sages, saints, and mystics throughout the centuries have cultivated through meditation and contemplative prayer. The ability to recognize dualism and adopt an integrated way of seeing allows a person to recognize the underlying unity and connection between themselves, others, the Divine, and all of creation.

This way of thinking and being dissolves the distinction between loving our neighbors and loving ourselves. The distress and suffering of others is no longer someone else’s problem, but instead becomes our own pain and our own suffering. The racial wounds of our city in need of healing are no longer someone else’s wounds, but our very own. This, I believe, is what it means to love your neighbor as yourself, and what Jesus is getting at in Matthew 25 when he tells his followers that in caring for the least of these, they are caring for him.

I deeply love and appreciate Richmond Hill because it’s a place for everyone to practice living the questions. It’s not a place you come to find clear answers, but a place you find yourself when none of the typical answers make sense anymore. It may not always be a comfortable place, because uncertainty is rarely comfortable, but it is a safe place for questioning. You may not find answers here, but you will find unconditional love, hospitality, and an invitation to listen to the gentle whisper of the Spirit as she asks, “What are you doing here?”

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

 – Hayden Hobby is a new Richmond Hill resident, working on staff as the Marketing and Communications Coordinator. Hayden is also a writer and musician who recently graduated from Bethany Theological Seminary with his masters in spiritual and social transformation.