I Quit Asking What Any Of It Meant

Vernon stopped asking in about the fourth year and it was the sensible thing to do.

Four years is a long time to ask a question and get nothing back. He is not going to lay out what the stretch was; he will only say that it went on longer than anybody expected and that it took some things that are not coming back.

And through the whole of it he asked. Not angrily. He is not an angry man. He asked the way a man asks who genuinely wants to know: what is this, what am I supposed to be seeing here, what is it for.

And nothing came. Not a word, not a sense, not an impression, not a verse arriving at the right moment. Four years of a straight question into a room with nobody answering.

So he stopped. And here is the thing he wants understood: stopping helped. Immediately. The asking had become the sorest part of the whole business, because every ask was a small hope and every silence was a small letting down, and doing that two or three times a week for four years wears a place in a man.

Once he stopped, the days got easier. He is not lying about that and he will not pretend he regrets it.

He is sixty-one now and it has been eleven years since he asked God what anything meant.

He still goes. He still prays; he prays for people all the time and means it. He simply does not ask that particular question anymore, about anything, and the not-asking has quietly spread out from that stretch to cover everything else, and he did not notice it spreading.

You may know that quitting.

Maybe you also asked until asking was the sorest part. Maybe stopping genuinely helped. And maybe you have not asked about anything since.

Where the question gets asked

There is a question in Genesis that everybody quotes and almost nobody notices the address of, and the address is the point.

And they said unto him, We have dreamed a dream, and there is no interpreter of it. And Joseph said unto them, Do not interpretations belong to God? tell me them, I pray you.Genesis 40:8

Do not interpretations belong to God?

Now look where the man saying that is standing. He is in a prison. He has been sold by his own family, he has been lied about, and he is years into a stretch that he did not deserve and that has taken things from him that are not coming back.

Nobody has explained his own situation to him. Not once. He is asking this question about somebody else's dream out of the middle of an unexplained life of his own.

And notice the second half, which is the part that gets skipped: tell me them, I pray you. He asks to hear it. He leans in. A man with every reason to have stopped caring what anything means is the one saying go on then, tell me.

Which means the question survived the prison. It was not answered by the prison, and it was not withdrawn because of it, and the man carrying it had a better case for quitting than most people ever have.

And the question is still available to a man who was not answered. The written word puts it in the mouth of somebody years into an unexplained stretch of his own, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a man who has not asked anything for eleven years.

And He gives the meaning as well as the words. The word says interpretations belong to God, plainly, as a question with one answer, and the Spirit is the one who supplies it rather than requiring a man to work it out himself.

What the stopping actually did

Now the accounting, because you were right about the short run and nobody has ever told you what happened in the long one.

Stopping worked. It did exactly what you needed it to do. The soreness went, the days got easier, and you got through years that you might not have got through otherwise. I am not going to stand here and tell you that was a mistake, because it was not.

But a thing you stop doing to protect yourself does not stay in the place where you stopped it.

You stopped asking about the stretch. Then you stopped asking about the year after it. And then it became simply not a question you ask, about anything, and by now there is no live version of it anywhere in your life and the closing happened so gradually that you never once caught it moving.

That is not backsliding and it is not hardness. It is what a bandage does when nobody takes it off: it stays exactly as long as it is left, and it goes on doing its one job long after the job is finished.

And what closed was a wound rather than your heart. The word says a wounded spirit who can bear, which is a question and not an accusation, and the Spirit is the one who names eleven years as protection rather than as drift.

And nothing about you is under review for eleven years of not asking. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has gone on praying for other people the whole time.

And nobody is explaining the four years

Let me be plain, because you are braced for an article that tells you what the stretch meant, and I do not know and I am not going to guess.

Nothing here supplies an answer to it. Nobody on this page has one. Making one up for you would be the exact failure this whole subject is fenced against, and a manufactured meaning handed to a man eleven years later would be worse than the silence was.

And nothing here promises you get one now, either. That is not mine to promise and it never was.

What is on offer is only the question itself, live again, in your mouth, about anything at all. And the willingness, which is the harder half, to ask it and get nothing and not have that mean what it meant last time.

And you are permitted to ask without being owed an answer. The word has him asking out of a prison with his own situation still unexplained, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a setup for another letting down.