Four Times I Nearly Asked

Keoni has nearly asked four times and he can date all four.

The first was in a car park after a men's thing, standing beside a man he trusted, and he got as far as can I ask you something and then asked him about a completely different matter and drove home.

The second was in a message he typed out and deleted. He remembers deleting it because his thumb hovered and then he closed the app instead, which is a specific and slightly humiliating memory.

The third was at his niece's, of all places, watching her go under with everybody clapping, and he leaned toward his sister and opened his mouth and then made a remark about the weather.

The fourth was eleven weeks ago. He has not told anybody about that one and he is not going to.

Nine years. Four almosts.

And the reason he has never got the sentence out is not shyness. Keoni is not shy. He runs a crew of eleven men and speaks to them every morning.

It is that he does not know how to finish the sentence.

Can I ask you something. I want to go in the water again, because.

Because what? He does not have a because. He was baptized, properly, at twenty-four, in front of people who loved him, by a man who is still alive and still good. Nothing went wrong. There is no story here. He cannot point at a defect and say that, fix that.

There is only a feeling that comes round, roughly twice a year, that something did not fasten, and a corresponding urge to go and do it again, and no sentence in the English language that can hold both of those without sounding like he has lost his grip.

You may know the almost.

Maybe you have nearly asked. Maybe you have asked and been talked out of it, kindly, and gone home feeling both relieved and worse. Maybe you have never once said it out loud and are startled to see it written down.

I am not going to tell you not to ask

Let me clear the ground straight away, because I suspect you are braced for me to talk you out of it.

I am not here to do that.

I am not going to tell you that going again is wrong, and I am not going to tell you it is right, and I am not going to enter the argument about it at all. Sincere people have divided over that for a very long time. You did not arrive here to be enrolled on a side; you arrived carrying an almost you cannot finish.

And if, having read this, you still want to talk to somebody about it, then talk to somebody. A real person, face to face, somewhere you are actually known. Say the sentence out loud even if it comes out badly. Find someone.

That is the whole of what I have to say about the doing of it, and I am stopping there on purpose, because you are on the other side of a screen and I do not know one thing about your circumstances.

And you cannot fail a category on this page. The written word gives one baptism and no examination with it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a settling in a man who has been carrying an unfinished sentence for nine years.

Whose operation was it

What I do want to do is look at the because, because I think I know what is in the gap.

Here is how Colossians describes the thing that happened to you at twenty-four.

Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead.Colossians 2:12

Stop on that phrase. The operation of God.

An operation is a work performed. Somebody does it, and somebody has it done to them, and the two are not the same person. And Paul does not say the operation of the church, or the operation of your understanding, or the operation of the day going well.

He names the surgeon.

And the operation was His and it was not yours to perform. The word puts the burying and the rising under the operation of God, and the Spirit is the one who makes that reach a man who has spent nine years wondering whether he did his part adequately.

And nothing about it is waiting on you to finish it. The word says ye are risen, in the completed tense, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than leaving a man to audit himself twice a year.

What the almost is actually reaching for

Now here is what I think the urge is, and I offer it gently because I could be wrong about your particular version.

I do not think you want the water. I think you want the fastening.

You want something to click. Some moment where the thing stops being a fact you hold and becomes a floor you stand on. And because the only ceremony you know of is the water, the urge attaches itself to the water, twice a year, like a hand reaching for the nearest handle in the dark.

That urge is not silly and it is not faithlessness. It is a real hunger and it is pointed at a real thing.

It is just that the fastening was never in the ceremony's gift. It was not withheld from you at twenty-four by a defective morning. It has always been the operation of God, and He is not a surgeon who leaves a job half done and waits nine years to see whether the patient will come back and ask nicely.

And you are risen with Him already and that is not pending. The word puts it as an accomplished thing through the faith of the operation of God, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that settledness, which no ceremony has ever manufactured on demand.

And He is not somebody who leaves work unfinished. The word says he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a floor under a man standing in a car park failing to say a sentence.