I Asked And Got Nothing

Bethan did it properly, which is why the silence has been so hard to file.

She did not fire it off in the car. She set an evening aside. She turned the television off, which she never does, and she sat at the kitchen table with the decision written on one side of a piece of paper, and she asked out loud, because she thought out loud might matter.

She asked for about forty minutes.

And there was nothing. Not a sense, not a leaning, not a verse that turned up, not a word from a friend the following week that she could reasonably read as anything. Nothing at all, for three months since.

She is thirty-four. And what she has done with the silence, without ever deciding to, is build a theory about the asking.

She must have done it wrong. That is the theory. Perhaps out loud was strange and self-conscious. Perhaps forty minutes was performance. Perhaps she should not have written it down, or should have written it differently, or should have fasted, or should have asked with somebody rather than alone, or should have got the wording right, because there was a moment about twenty minutes in where she heard how she sounded and it put her off.

She has never considered that she asked fine.

That option is not in the theory, because if she asked fine then the silence has to mean something else, and every other thing it could mean is worse.

You may know that table.

Maybe you also set an evening aside once. Maybe you also heard yourself and winced. And maybe you have spent months since going back over the technique of the asking rather than sitting with what came back.

Who gets guided, according to the psalm

There is a verse in Psalm 25 that names the condition for being guided, and the condition is not what people expect.

The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way.Psalm 25:9

The meek.

Not the articulate. Not the ones who set aside a proper evening, and not the ones who got the wording right, and not the ones who did it out loud rather than in their heads.

Meek there is not weak and it is not shy. It is closer to teachable: somebody who is not currently insisting on an answer, who has not decided in advance what the answer must be, and who is not in the middle of managing how they look while they ask.

Which means the twenty minutes where you heard yourself and winced is not the disqualifying part of that evening. It might be the most meek thing in the whole forty.

And you asked fine and the fault was never in your technique. The written word makes the condition meekness rather than method, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has been reviewing a forty minute recording in her head for three months.

And you are not being marked on how you sounded. The word says the LORD looketh on the heart, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than assessing a performance at a kitchen table.

What silence is not

Now let me take up the thing underneath the theory.

You built a theory about the asking because the alternatives frightened you. I want to name those alternatives, because unnamed they are much bigger.

The first is that He did not answer because He does not answer you. That is not true and there is nothing in the text that supports it, and you would not believe it about anybody else.

The second is that there was an answer and you missed it, which would make the whole thing a test of perception you failed. That is not how the psalm describes guidance either; it makes the guiding His action and does not make the reception a skill.

And the third, which nobody puts on the list, is that the answer to which of these should I do was not withheld and was not missed, and simply was not the answer to the question you needed most that evening.

And silence is not the same thing as absence. The word says I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee, and it never once ties His presence to how audible He is, and the Spirit is the one who makes that hold at a table with the television off.

And you did not fail a test that was never set. The word puts the guiding in His hands as something He does rather than something you achieve, and the Spirit is the one who supplies that rather than requiring you to have detected anything.

What the timing might be doing

One more thing, and it is not a promise, so please do not read it as one.

You asked three months ago. The decision is still open. Nothing has forced it.

There is a kind of guidance that only makes sense as it arrives and would be useless earlier, and there is a kind of question that a person can only really hear the answer to once the situation has moved a little.

I am not telling you that is what is happening here. I do not know. Nobody writing anything anywhere knows, and I am not going to sell you a reassurance I cannot stand behind.

What I am telling you is that three months of silence is not yet evidence about anything, and it is certainly not evidence about your technique.

And you will know what to do when you need to know it. The word says the LORD will guide thee continually, in a present continuous rather than a single delivery, and the Spirit is the one who makes continually mean along the way rather than up front.