At the mosque last Friday, after prayers, an elderly man approached me with tears in his eyes. “Brother,” he said, “I’ve been praying for forty years for Allah to show me my purpose. What if He answers, and I don’t like what He tells me?”
I had no response because his fear was mine, articulated with the clarity that comes from a lifetime of wrestling with the same terror: What if we get what we’re asking for?
We tell ourselves we want answers. We pray for clarity, seek wisdom, demand explanations from a universe that seems determined to remain silent. But buried beneath our seeking is a darker truth—we’re often more comfortable with the mystery than we would be with the revelation.
I think about this when I watch Arash discover new things. Last week, he found a bird’s nest that had fallen from our neighbor’s tree. For days, he stared at it with wonder, asking question after question: How do birds know how to build? Why this shape? How do they choose the materials? Each question spawned three more, and I could see the joy in his eyes growing with each mystery uncovered.
Then I made the mistake adults often make—I googled “bird nest construction” and began explaining the scientific mechanisms behind nest-building behavior. I watched the wonder drain from his face as mystery transformed into mere information. The questions that had delighted him became problems to be solved rather than marvels to be experienced.
“Oh,” he said quietly, and put the nest away.
In that moment, I understood something I’d been avoiding: answers don’t just illuminate—they eliminate. Every question answered is a mystery killed, a possibility collapsed, a space for imagination closed forever.
This is why we’re afraid. We sense that getting the answers we think we want might rob us of something more valuable than ignorance—the rich, fertile darkness where possibilities live before they’re forced into the harsh light of certainty.
I remember when Happy and I were first married, spending long evenings talking about everything—our dreams, fears, the kind of parents we wanted to be, the life we would build together. There was magic in those conversations because everything was still possible. We could imagine ourselves as any kind of couple, any kind of family. The future existed in a state of infinite potential.
Fifteen years later, we have answers to many of those questions. We know what kind of parents we became (imperfect but loving), what kind of life we built (modest but meaningful). These answers are good answers, fulfilling in their own way. But something was lost in the knowing—the intoxicating possibility that we might become anything at all.
This is the price of answers: they make us specific when we might prefer to remain infinite.
I think about my relationship with faith, how for years I’ve asked Allah to show me the right path, to make clear what He wants from me. But lately, I’ve been wondering if my prayers are entirely honest. Do I really want God to speak directly to me, or do I prefer the ambiguity that allows me to interpret His silence in whatever way serves my current needs?
If Allah appeared tomorrow and told me exactly how to live, what to prioritize, which choices to make, would I be grateful or terrified? Divine certainty would eliminate the space for doubt, but it would also eliminate the space for growth, for wrestling, for the kind of faith that must be chosen rather than compelled.
The questions that keep me awake at night—Am I a good father? Am I wasting my life? Is there meaning in my suffering?—these questions are torture, but they’re also freedom. As long as they remain questions, all answers remain possible. I might be an excellent father whose mistakes will build character in my son. I might be living exactly the life I was meant to live. My suffering might be carving out space in my soul for greater joy.
But if I knew the answers with certainty, I would have to live with whatever truth was revealed. What if I discovered I am indeed a mediocre father? What if my life is genuinely meaningless? What if my suffering is just suffering, serving no purpose beyond its own existence?
Questions allow us to hope. Answers force us to know.
This is why we sabotage our own seeking. We ask for wisdom but turn away when it approaches. We demand truth but construct elaborate defenses against it. We pray for answers while secretly hoping God maintains His mysterious silence.
I see this in the way people approach therapy, education, spiritual practice—with one foot out the door, ready to retreat if the insights become too uncomfortable. We want to grow, but only in directions we’ve pre-approved. We want to change, but only into better versions of who we already think we are.
Last month, I started reading a book about Islamic philosophy that I’d been avoiding for years. I told myself I was too busy, but the truth was I was afraid it might challenge beliefs I wasn’t ready to examine. On page thirty-seven, I found an interpretation of divine justice that completely contradicted my comfortable understanding. I closed the book and haven’t opened it since.
This is what we do: we seek until we find something that threatens our carefully constructed worldview, then we stop seeking and pretend we never started.
But here’s what I’m learning: the fear of answers is really a fear of responsibility. Questions allow us to remain perpetual students, but answers make us accountable to what we know. Once you understand something, you can no longer claim ignorance as an excuse for inaction.
If I truly understood what it means to be a good father, I would have to become one. If I clearly saw what my life’s purpose is, I would have to pursue it. If I knew what God wanted from me, I would have to give it.
Questions are comfortable because they ask nothing of us but curiosity. Answers are terrifying because they demand change.
The elderly man at the mosque was afraid not that God wouldn’t answer his prayers, but that God would. He was afraid that divine purpose might look different from human preference, that the life God wanted for him might not be the life he wanted for himself.
I understood his fear because I share it. We all
