Christopher Kwon’s Reviews > I Once Was Lost: What Postmodern Skeptics Taught Us About Their Path to Jesus > Status Update

We offer it (the five thresholds framework) as a discernment tool, something to help you ask good questions. As you seek God for wisdom about what your non-Christian friends need, you are in a great learning posture. Our hope is that as you use this tool with the Lord and your community to understand your non-Christian friends and neighbors more clearly, you will grow in servant evangelism.

By living out the kingdom in front of our friends and inviting them into safe places where they can stretch their seeking muscles, we can help demystify the seeking process and help them enter the seeking posture.

We have found that we can help our (curious) friends become open by being (prayerfully) patient and by challenging them. Both are important.

This tenuous dance of "suspending disbelief" and daring to try on what it could be like to believe what Jesus says sometimes takes time. And we need to be patient with that. They need to know that we are their friend regardless of what they decide. They need to know that we like them even as they are, not only if they change. And sometimes they just need space.

a principle we have seen again and again in our postmodern friends who have come to faith: before actively seeking God and considering becoming a follower of Jesus, they had to become open to change in their life. And becoming open to change is much harder than it may seem on the surface. It is actually a heroic, mysterious, deep thing.

Not only would it behoove us to learn and use the parables of Jesus and all they contain, but we also could do a better job of noticing the parables all around us today … we should practice the regular habit of noticing parables all around us and learning how to use them to provoke curiosity about Jesus.

One of the greatest acts of love we can give is to ask good questions and help our friends learn to ask more questions for themselves. We live in an age of too much info, too few good questions. Let's be the ones to ask great questions. Spark curiosity wherever you go, just like Jesus. Let's be like Jesus: let's ask intriguing questions that help our friends think about life from angles they have never considered.

We combat the temptation to argue and push away through opening our arms in hospitality. Come and see, we say. And in this way distrust begins to melt and trust is built in unimaginable ways.

Following Jesus' lead and being a learner means that we too ask good questions, even of those who are annoying or distrustful. He is fully present and captivated by them, their story, their yearnings, their needs. He listens to their "whole story" and shows us how to be intrigued with each person's uniqueness. Instead of cringing and feeling bruised by their distrust, we must lean into them and learn.