Frightened To Ask

Mairi wants to be precise about this because the imprecise version is what everybody assumes.

She does not doubt that He can. That is not the difficulty and it has never been the difficulty, and if you sat her down and asked her theologically she would give you a completely orthodox answer without hesitating and she would mean every word.

What she cannot face is the room afterwards.

Because there is a specific quality to the hours and days after you have asked for something large and plainly. A kind of listening. And then a stretch where nothing happens, which is not itself terrible, and then the slow arrival of the understanding that nothing is going to, and that particular arrival is what she has stopped being able to do.

So she has stopped asking for anything that could produce it.

It happened gradually and she can date the last large one to about four years ago. Since then she asks for things in a form that cannot disappoint: for help, for grace, for people to be looked after, for the strength to cope with whatever happens. All good things. All entirely unfalsifiable.

She is forty-four and she knows exactly what she is doing, which is the part that bothers her, because a person doing this unknowingly could be forgiven and a person doing it deliberately feels like something else.

You may know that stretch.

Maybe you have also stopped asking for the things that could come back empty. Maybe you also know exactly what you are doing. And maybe you have never said out loud that it is not doubt.

The word is boldly and it is about approach

There is an invitation in Hebrews and the adverb in it is doing all the work.

Let us therefore come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.Hebrews 4:16

Come boldly.

The word carries the sense of speaking freely, saying everything, holding nothing back. It is a word about the manner of approach rather than about the confidence of the outcome, and that distinction is the whole thing for you.

You have been reading boldness as a prediction: that a bold ask is one made by somebody expecting a yes, and that to ask boldly you would have to be able to face the no in advance.

That is not what the word says. It describes a person who says the whole thing plainly, without editing it down on the way in, and it says nothing whatever about what they anticipate.

Which means the hedged form of your asking for four years is not a failure of confidence in God. It is an editing of the request, and the verse addresses exactly that and nothing else.

And you are invited to come and say the whole thing without editing it. The written word makes the boldness a property of the approach rather than a prediction about the answer, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been asking in unfalsifiable forms since a Tuesday four years ago.

And you can expect Him without putting Him on terms. The word attaches mercy and help to the coming rather than to the outcome of any particular request, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than trading an ask for a result.

It is not unbelief and the distinction matters

Now let me hold the thing you were precise about, because you were right to be and almost nobody would grant it.

This is not unbelief.

Unbelief would be doubting that He can, and you do not. What you have is an entirely intact theology and a nervous system that has learned what the fourth day after a large ask feels like, and it is protecting you from that by removing the occasions.

Those are different conditions and they need different treatment. Being told to have more faith would be useless to you, because your faith is not the variable. What is happening is closer to what happens to a person who has been let down by a particular kind of appointment and finds themselves not making appointments.

And I am not going to tell you the stretch is bearable. You know what it is like and I am not going to minimize it from here.

And you are not looking at unbelief when you look at this. The word makes the invitation about approach rather than about certainty of outcome, which means a person can come boldly without any prediction at all, and the Spirit is the one who makes that distinction usable rather than academic.

And nothing about you is under review for four years of hedging. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who knows exactly what she is doing and has been harder on herself for that than anybody else would be.

What the unfalsifiable asks have cost

One practical observation.

Everything you have asked for in four years is good, and some of it has been answered, and you have not been able to notice any of that either.

That is the hidden cost. An unfalsifiable request cannot disappoint and it also cannot be seen to be answered, because you can never tell whether the strength you had was given or was simply yours. You built a form of prayer that removes the risk, and it removed the evidence at the same time, and you have therefore had four years with nothing in the column at all.

Which is not more restful than the alternative. It is a different kind of empty.

And you have not been able to see what was given because of the form you asked in. The word says ye have not, because ye ask not, in a sentence about asking rather than about deserving, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a description of a mechanism rather than a rebuke.