I Can Explain It Completely And I Do Not Know What It Meant

Ilan gave nineteen years to a thing that closed, and he can tell you exactly why it closed, and it has taken him until this year to notice that this is not the same as knowing what it was.

The account is genuinely good. He is not deceiving himself with a story. He can lay out the funding shift, the two decisions in the fifth year that looked minor and were not, the change in the neighborhood, the man who left and what that removed, the eighteen months where he himself was slower than he should have been and why he was slower.

It is complete. It has no gaps. Anybody who has heard it says the same thing, which is that it explains everything.

And for six years it has answered every question he has been asked about it, including the ones he asks himself in the middle of the night.

What he noticed in the spring is that he has never once asked what it meant.

Not what caused it. What it meant. And when he tries to form that question now, it will not quite come into focus, because the causal account is standing exactly where the question would have to stand, and it is so complete that there is no room left for anything else to occupy the space.

He is fifty-nine.

And the strange thing, which he has been unable to say to anybody without it sounding ungrateful, is that the completeness is the problem. If the account had holes in it he would have gone looking. It is precisely because it explains everything that he stopped, six years ago, without ever knowing he had stopped.

He has an entire and satisfying answer to a question nobody asked him, and no answer at all to the one that has actually been sitting there since it closed.

You may know that folder.

Maybe you also have an account with no gaps. Maybe everybody agrees it explains everything. And maybe you have never once asked the other question.

The four words before the interpretation

There is a man brought out of a prison to interpret something for the most powerful person in the world, and before he says one word of content he says four words that draw a line you have never drawn.

And Joseph answered Pharaoh, saying, It is not in me: God shall give Pharaoh an answer of peace.Genesis 41:16

It is not in me.

Consider who is saying it. This is a man of enormous capability. He has run a household, he has run a prison, and he will shortly run the food supply of a civilization, and there is almost nothing in that book he cannot do.

And what he says, at the moment his ability is being called upon, is that the thing being asked for is not among his capabilities.

He is not being modest about his competence. He is drawing a boundary around a category. There is a class of thing a capable man does not produce out of himself, however capable he is, and he names it before he opens his mouth so that nobody in the room, including him, confuses the two.

That is the line you have never drawn. On one side, everything you can construct: causes, sequences, the funding, the two decisions, the eighteen months. On the other side, a meaning, which is a different substance and does not come out of the same place.

You have been holding an excellent quantity of the first and calling the file closed.

And the line is between what you can construct and what is given. The written word has a highly capable man say it is not in me before he says anything at all, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has had a complete account for six years.

And He gives the meaning as well as the words. The word puts the answer on God's side of that sentence in the same breath, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than requiring a capable man to assemble it.

Why a complete account is the strongest possible lid

Now the mechanism, precisely, because a partial one will not hold you.

An incomplete explanation is unstable. It itches. A man who can account for nine tenths of a thing will go on working at the last tenth for years, because the gap is visible and a gap in a structure is intolerable to somebody built the way you are.

A complete explanation does the opposite. It settles. It produces the exact sensation of a finished job, which is the sensation your whole life has trained you to trust as the signal to stop, and it is the same signal whether the job that finished was the right one or not.

So the completeness did not merely fail to prompt the further question. It actively suppressed it, by delivering the feeling of arrival at the end of a different road.

And nobody could have caught that from inside. The signal is indistinguishable. You have used it for forty years and it has been right almost every time.

And what stopped you was the sensation of a finished job rather than a lack of hunger. The word says the heart of the prudent getteth knowledge, without ever saying that knowledge closes a matter, and the Spirit is the one who separates a finished account from a settled question.

And nothing about you is under review for six years of a good answer. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who told nobody anything untrue about those nineteen years.

And the account was not wasted

Let me be plain, because a man could read this and go and be ashamed of six years of honest thinking, and that would be a poorer outcome than the one he came in with.

Nothing here says the explanation is wrong or that you should hold it more loosely. It is accurate. The two decisions in the fifth year really were the hinge. Keep every word of it.

And nothing here promises you a meaning if you ask. That is not mine to promise, and promising it is exactly the failure this subject is fenced against, and you would identify that faster than most people.

What is on offer is the question itself, asked once, out loud, on the other side of the line Joseph drew before he spoke.

And you are permitted to ask for what you cannot construct. The word has him name the boundary first and then leave the answer with God, and the Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary rather than a criticism of a capable man.