The Answers Are Coming

Some visits remain with you, not because something big happens or anything is resolved.. Sometimes it is just one honest sentence that keeps returning to you long after you have left.

This trip, that sentence came while I was sitting with a man who is thirty-two years old who has spent half of his life inside prison. He came in as a kid, a youthful offender, so much of his growing up has happened behind walls.

And yet he has been looking for real answers. Not the kind that make a person sound spiritual or wise, but the kind that come from sitting with your own life and asking questions you cannot easily put down. How did I get here? Could it have gone differently? What was happening in me then? Can I still change?

During a stretch in solitary, something began to open in him. Solitary became a place where the mind is met without distraction. For some, that kind of isolation can break something. For others, and sometimes for the same person, it can bring questions to the surface that have been waiting for years.

He kept going back to the event that brought him to prison. He kept turning it over through one thought: it could have been different. One moment. One choice. One pause in the chain of events.

That kind of question can torment a person. It can also wake someone up.

I was able to get the movie The Butterfly Effect in for him to watch. Something in the idea reached him: the way small moments can ripple outward in ways we could not see at the time.

It became a way of looking at his own life.

He started to see that a life is not only made of the big events we remember. It is also made of small turns: the thoughts we follow, the reactions we never question, the moments when pain moves through us before we know what is happening.

Since then, he has been working through a process, one lesson at a time. During our visit, he said something I have thought about many times since.

He said, “I’ve read the Bible, and I’ve read the Quran, and it only left me with more questions. I’m reading A Course in Miracles, and it’s answering all my questions.”

I could feel how sincere he was. He was not comparing religions. He was simply describing what it feels like when something finally reaches the place in you that has been asking.

That certainly resonated. Of course it did. That same book has meant a great deal in my own life. But I also have to remember something else.

It is called A Course in Miracles.

A course. Not the course.

That distinction matters. There are many ways a person begins to hear what he has been waiting for. For one person it may come through scripture. For another, through silence, recovery, loss, friendship, or a book that arrives at the right time. The form is not always the same, but we know when something true begins to reach us.

We do not all have to use the same words to recognize honesty, forgiveness, responsibility, and love. We do not have to come through the same doorway to know when peace has entered the room.

It would be easy to make the book the point. Or the method. Or the language.

But the point is the experience. The point is the opening. The point is what happens when someone begins to see himself differently, maybe for the first time ever.

When he told me the Course was answering his questions, I did not hear concepts or labels. I heard relief. I heard a man saying, something is finally making sense.

So many of us are carrying questions, even when we do not say them out loud. We tuck them under our opinions, our business, our personality. But underneath, many of us are asking the same things in different forms: Can I be forgiven? Am I more than what I did? Is there another way?

And then something lands. A sentence. A film. A visit. A page in a book. A quiet moment in a place no one would choose.

Something says, look again.

That is what I felt sitting with him. I was watching a man willing to keep looking.

Not every question gets answered the moment we ask it. We are being made ready to receive what we could not have understood before.That visit reminded me that answers do come, though rarely on command and rarely in the form we expected. Often they come quietly, with just enough clarity for the next step.

Maybe that is enough for today: to keep looking, to stay willing, and to leave space for what is already on its way.

The answers are coming.