I Miss The Asking

Yvette stopped in about 2014 and she did not notice for two years that she had.

There was no last time. That is the strange part. She has gone looking for a last time and cannot locate one, because it was not a decision, it was an erosion, and erosions do not have dates.

For most of her twenties and thirties she asked. Constantly, in a way she now finds slightly embarrassing to remember. In the car, at the sink, walking to the bus, at every meeting, at the end of every service. She asked for the thing, whatever the thing was, and she asked with her whole chest.

And it did not come, and it did not come, and it did not come, and at some point somewhere in her forties the asking got quieter and then it got occasional and then it stopped.

She would tell you she is at peace with it. She would use the word settled. And there is something real in that: she is far less frantic than she was at twenty-nine, and less frantic is not nothing.

But here is what she has never said, and what she noticed properly at a funeral about eight months ago, standing at the back while a room sang something she used to sing with her whole chest.

She does not miss the answer.

She misses the asking.

She misses being a woman who wanted something that much. The frantic twenty-nine year old had something she does not have, and it was not an experience, it was an appetite, and she traded it away without ever agreeing to the trade.

You might know the erosion.

You cannot find your last time either. You would say you are settled. And something happens in you at a certain kind of moment that suggests settled is not quite the word.

The psalm about being thirsty, with no correction attached

There is a psalm that opens with an image of an animal in distress, and I want you to notice what the psalm does not do with it.

As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?Psalm 42:1-2

Panteth. That is a deer that has been running and cannot find water. It is not a picture of serenity.

And nowhere in that psalm does anybody tell him to calm down. Nobody suggests that a mature believer would not be panting. There is no correction, no rebuke, no gentle suggestion that the wanting is itself a sign of something unresolved.

The thirst is simply reported, in the first person, and then the psalm continues in the same voice for another forty verses.

And you are not looking at the immature part of yourself when you look at that hunger. The written word puts the panting in a psalm and never once corrects it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been calling its absence maturity for a decade.

And you are allowed to want it out loud again. The word says when shall I come and appear before God, which is a question with no answer given in the text, and the Spirit is the one who makes an unanswered question safe to ask rather than dangerous.

What you actually protected yourself from

Now let me name what the erosion was for, because I think it was doing a real job.

You stopped asking because asking hurt.

Every ask was a small opening of the hand, and every non-arrival closed it slightly, and after fifteen years of that a person's hand starts staying closed on its own without any decision being made. That is not faithlessness. That is a nervous system doing exactly what a nervous system is for.

And I am not going to tell you to just start asking again, as though the fifteen years never happened and you can be twenty-nine on Tuesday. You cannot, and being told to would only add a failure to a loss.

What I will say is that the thing you protected yourself from was disappointment, and the thing you paid with was the appetite, and you may not have known the price at the time.

And you have an appetite that was put away rather than lost, and those are different words. The word says he satisfieth the longing soul, which assumes a longing soul exists to be satisfied, and the Spirit is the one who restores an appetite rather than requiring you to generate one.

And nothing about you is under review for having stopped. The word says like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him, for he knoweth our frame, and the Spirit is the one who makes pity in that sentence mean tenderness rather than condescension.

And I am not going to promise you the answer

I want to be honest with you at exactly the place where somebody usually is not.

I cannot tell you that if you start asking again it will come this time. I do not know. Nobody writing anything anywhere knows that, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you the same disappointment in nicer packaging.

What I can tell you is what Jesus said about the wind: that it blows where it wills and nobody can account for it or date it. Which cuts both ways, and the second way is the one nobody mentions. It means the fifteen years of nothing were never proof of absence, because absence is not one of the things that can be established about a thing beyond accounting.

And His Spirit is in you and you did not have to summon Him. The word makes the wind unaccountable in both directions, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than confirming or denying a fifteen year search.