The Lord is always telling us to seek so we can find, and to knock so it can be opened to us. In other words, He wants us to learn to ask questions. Our Father in Heaven is not offended when we question what we learn. He is actually pleased that we are taking the effort to wrestle with an idea and trying to figure out how it fits into our understanding of the gospel. If we don’t ask, He can’t answer. If we don’t seek, we can’t find. We are supposed to question everything. Usually, if we don’t question something we aren’t going to get a testimony of its truthfulness.
So what do you do when you see a paragraph in a Church manual and the information is so plain or simple that you don’t know what to do with it? This is where learning to ask questions comes in handy. Learn to question the definition of words. We may think we know what a word means, but if we look it up in the dictionary or in the Bible Dictionary or in the topics section of lds.org, we will most likely find that there are uses for the word we never imagined before. Just recently I asked my Gospel Principles class if “eternal” was a name or a period of time. In the final lesson of the class manual it used the word “eternal,” which is a period of time. If the manual had used the word “Eternal,” it might have been referring to one of the names of God, for Eternal is His name.