The Question Is In the Book

Yvette has had the same question since she was seven and she has never once had it answered without being corrected.

Something happened when she was seven. It is not mine to describe and it is not the point of this article, and whatever happened to you is not it, and the moment I put detail on it you will start comparing.

What matters is that she was a child in a church, and she asked.

She asked in the plain way a seven-year-old asks, which is the best way anybody ever asks anything, and the answers came back warm and fast and every one of them moved her off it.

God has a plan. God is in control. He works everything for good. We do not always understand. You have to trust Him.

Nobody was unkind. Some of those people were genuinely good to her and one of them is why she still goes.

But the thing she learned in those years was not any of the sentences. It was the tone underneath them, and the tone said: the question is the problem.

Not: this is hard. Not: I do not know. The question itself was a thing to be managed, gently, and moved past, and every adult in that building had a version of the maneuver.

So by about eleven she had stopped asking, and she kept the question.

She is thirty-eight and she still has it, word for word, and it has never once been said out loud in a room with other people in it.

She teaches the nine-year-olds now.

And in the spring one of them, a boy who says everything he thinks, asked her about something that had been on the news that week. Straight out, in front of everybody, in the plain way.

And she felt the whole apparatus come up in her. Every deflection she was ever handed, all of them arriving at once, warm and fast and ready.

And she did not use them.

She said, "That is a real question. I have had it since I was seven."

And the room went completely quiet.

And the boy said, "Okay."

And that was it. Nobody was damaged. Nothing collapsed. Two of them looked relieved in a way she is still thinking about, and one girl at the back who never says anything looked up.

Yvette sat in that room afterward on a chair built for a nine-year-old and cried a bit.

Now let me ask you how old you were.

Because if this is yours there is an age attached to it, and there is a specific question, and you have been carrying it since then with a private understanding that it is not a permitted thing to say.

What is actually printed there

Open the Psalms and read the ones nobody puts on a wall.

Why do You stand afar off, O Lord? Why do You hide Yourself in times of trouble?Psalm 10:1

Read who that is addressed to. It is not a complaint about God to a friend. It says O Lord. It is spoken to His face, and it uses His name, and the two questions in it are the exact two you were taught to put down.

And this is not one stray verse.

Psalm 13 opens with how long four times in two verses. Psalm 22 begins with the sentence Jesus Himself quoted from the cross. Psalm 44 says You have sold Your people cheaply, which is a harder line than anything you have ever thought. Psalm 74 asks why God's hand is in His pocket. Psalm 88 ends in the dark and does not turn.

Around a third of the collection is complaint.

And here is what matters most about that: this is a songbook. These were not private diaries somebody found. They were compiled for public worship and sung by God's people together, out loud, for centuries, and they are in the Bible with numbers on them.

God did not merely tolerate the question. He put it in the hymnal.

So hear this said over you, on a small chair in a room with paper on the floor. The question you have carried since you were seven is a permitted question, and it is printed in God's own songbook to be said out loud by a whole congregation. That is written across a third of the Psalms with His name in the vocative, and it is the Holy Spirit who intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words, which is God's own provision for a person who has a question and no acceptable way to phrase it.

Now let me be careful with the adults who deflected, because I am not going to make monsters out of them.

They did not have anywhere to put it either.

Most of them had been handed the same sentences in the same tone by somebody who loved them, and none of them had ever seen an adult sit in a room with an unanswerable question and stay there. They were frightened, and a frightened person reaches for the tidy answer, and the tidy answer travels down the generations like a family recipe.

You just broke that, in front of eleven nine-year-olds, by accident.

And I am not going to answer your question either.

I am not going to tell you why that happened to you when you were seven. Not a reason, not a purpose, not a plan you will understand later. I do not know. Nobody in a book or a pulpit knows, and any answer I invented would be one more warm fast sentence in a life that has had enough of them.

What I can tell you is the two things Scripture actually puts side by side and never reconciles for you.

He is working. That is stated everywhere and it is not in doubt.

And the reason is not given. That is also stated, over and over, and the people who say it loudest in the book are the ones God commends.

Those are both in there, unreconciled, on purpose, and living inside that gap is not a failure of faith. It is the ordinary condition of everybody in Scripture who ever went through anything.

The word says the secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, and that verse draws a line and puts some things firmly on the other side of it. And the Spirit of God is the one who helps in our weakness, which is God's answer to not being able to pray properly rather than a requirement that you learn how.