If He Wanted Me To Get It He Would Have Made It Obvious

Hana has a rule and the rule has been running her life for about six years.

The rule is simple and it sounds like faith. If God wanted her to understand something, He would have made it clear. He is not obscure. He is not playing games. Therefore anything she does not immediately understand is either not from Him, or not for her, and either way it is not her business.

She built it honestly. She built it, in fact, out of something good: she had been in a church for a while where things were read into everything, where a delayed train had a message in it, and she watched a friend get badly tangled up in that, and she left, and she made a rule so that it could never happen to her.

She is thirty-one.

And the rule works beautifully on the thing it was designed for. She has not once, in six years, constructed a meaning out of thin air. She is the least superstitious person in any room she is in.

What she did not notice is how much else the rule catches.

A verse that keeps arriving, three times in a month, from three unrelated directions: filed as coincidence, not looked at. A thing that happened last year that she still cannot account for: filed as unexplained, not returned to. A recurring, specific, unignorable pull toward something she would have to change her life to do: filed as not clear enough, and therefore not from Him.

Six years of that. Nothing invented, and nothing examined either.

And what has brought it up is that she cannot honestly say she has ever once sat down and asked what any of those meant, and she has begun to suspect that her rule has never actually been tested, because it has been quietly preventing every test.

You may know that rule.

Maybe you also built one after watching somebody go wrong. Maybe yours works. And maybe you have never checked what else it has been filtering.

What the hiding is for

There is a proverb about this in exactly two clauses, and the two clauses answer your rule completely, and they answer it in opposite directions.

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing: but the honour of kings is to search out a matter.Proverbs 25:2

It is the glory of God to conceal a thing.

That is the half your rule cannot survive. Concealment is not listed there as a problem, an accident, or a sign that something is unimportant. It is called His glory. It is presented as a thing He does deliberately, and does well, and is honored for.

Which means an unclear thing is not, by itself, evidence of anything at all. Your rule reads obscurity as a closed door. This verse reads it as a design feature.

And then the second clause tells you what to do about it, and the word it uses is not wait and not ignore: the honor of kings is to search out a matter.

Searching is honorable. It is the counterpart to the concealing, and the two halves make one motion: He hides, and it is glory; you look, and it is honor.

And an unclear thing is a design feature rather than a closed door. The written word calls concealment His glory in the first half and searching an honor in the second, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman whose rule has quietly prevented every test of itself.

And He gives the meaning as well as the words. The word puts both the hiding and the finding inside one relationship, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the second rather than requiring anything to arrive already obvious.

What the rule was really built to do

Now let me be accurate about where it came from, because you did not build it out of laziness and it deserves better than being called a dodge.

You watched somebody get tangled. You saw what it does to a person when everything means something, when a delay is a sign and a coincidence is a word and there is no floor under any of it. That was real damage and you were right to be alarmed.

So you built a rule that made that impossible. And it worked. It has been completely successful at the one job you gave it.

But a rule built in alarm is built with one direction in mind. It was designed to stop things coming in. Nothing in its construction was ever aimed at the opposite failure, because at the time the opposite failure was not the danger.

And a filter set to stop one kind of error does not sit neutrally. It has been running, continuously, for six years, on everything, and it cannot tell the difference between a delayed train and a verse that has arrived three times from three directions, because both of them arrive as not immediately obvious and that is the only property it checks.

And what is running is a filter rather than your faith. The word says prove all things, hold fast that which is good, and the Spirit is the one who shows that the second half of that instruction has had nothing to work on for six years.

And nothing about you is under review for six years of the rule. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who built it to protect herself and other people.

And I am not asking you to start reading trains

Let me be plain, because you have been braced for this whole article to be an invitation back into the thing you escaped, and it is not.

Nothing here says everything means something. Nothing here says look for signs, or treat coincidences as messages, or go back to a room where a delayed train has a message in it. That was harmful and you were right to leave and I would not send you an inch toward it.

And nothing here promises that if you sit down and search you will be given an answer. That is not mine to promise and the promising of it is exactly how people get hurt.

What is on offer is one thing you have never done: to take a single item out of the file, ask honestly what it means, and be willing to be told nothing.

That last part is not a caveat. It is the whole difference between searching and reading things into things, and you already know that better than most people because you watched what it looks like without it.

And you are permitted to look at a thing without deciding it in advance. The word calls the searching an honor and never promises a result, and the Spirit is the one who makes that safe rather than a door back into the room you left.