Say It To His Face

The first half finishes at half nine and the second one does not start until two, so there are four hours to be got through and nowhere in particular to get through them.

He does it in the canteen. Same table, by the window that looks onto the wash bay. A mug of tea going cold at the handle, a paper somebody left behind, and a radiator that only ever warms the leg nearest it.

Kev comes in at eleven with his sandwiches and sits down opposite and starts talking, the way Kev does, about the caravan. There is a photo of it on his phone, hitched up outside his house with the awning half out. He is pleased about it. He is not showing off. That is somehow the worst part.

Because the sum starts. It starts before he can stop it, the way it always does. Same depot. Same rota. Same rate on the same shifts. And Kev has a caravan, and there is a letter in his glovebox that he has not opened since Tuesday.

He nods in the right places. He says it looks lovely, and it does look lovely. And underneath the nodding the question is going round and round like a bus on a loop. Why him. Why not me. What exactly is the difference between the two of us.

He has never said it out loud. Not to Kev, obviously. Not at home. And not to God, because he has a feeling that if he said it to God, something would come loose that he would not be able to get back on.

So he finishes the tea and lets the question run, and at two he takes the same bus out along the same road, past the same driveways, and he knows precisely which ones have new cars sitting on them.

You have been carrying yours around the same way. That is why you opened this.

The question is already in the songbook

There is a song in the Bible about exactly this, and the man who wrote it led worship for a living.

Asaph is his name. He opens by saying his feet nearly went out from under him, and then he says why: he looked at people who were doing fine, people who had never once run the sum he was running, and he was envious of them (Psalm 73:2 and 3). He does not dress it up. He does not add a sentence at the end apologizing for the first one.

Now notice what happened next, because it is not a small thing. Nobody took it out. That song went into the collection God's people sang from, and it stayed, and it is still sitting there now, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carried it into the written record and kept it in.

So you are allowed to ask. Not tolerated, not permitted grudgingly with a warning attached: allowed, by a God who put the question in His own songbook in the first person and left it standing where anybody could read it. That is not my opinion about His temperament. That is Psalm 73, in the middle of Scripture, with the paint still wet on it.

A book that wanted you quiet would not have kept that song.

A question and a case are different objects

Here is what has been happening in the canteen, and it is worth seeing clearly, because from the outside the two things look identical.

A question is something you put to somebody who is in the room. It is open at the end. It expects an answer, or at the very least it expects a face.

A case is something built about somebody who is not in the room. It is closed. It has reached its verdict already, and it does not really need Him to say anything, because the file was finished a while ago.

The question has been going round that loop for years, and going round is not a neutral activity. It changes shape while it turns. That is what unasked questions do. They do not stay questions. They settle.

And you have not lost your trust. Read that twice, because you have been half expecting somebody to tell you that you have. What you have is a question nobody ever let you say out loud, which is a completely different object, and His Spirit has been holding you steady in the middle of it the whole time you assumed He was offended by it (Romans 8:26).

What He gives them takes nothing off you

I am not going to explain the caravan. I want to say that plainly, because somebody has probably tried, and the explanation is nearly always worse than the silence was.

I do not know why Kev has it and you do not. There may be no reason at all of the sort that would satisfy you, and I am not going to invent one and hand it to you as though it came down from God.

What I can tell you is what is written about Him, which is a different kind of statement altogether. Every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, and with Him there is no variation, no shadow of turning (James 1:17). Light is not the sort of thing that has to be rationed. He has never once had to dim one window in order to get another one lit.

So what came to him did not come off you. You are dealt with by Him directly, face to face and by name, and there is no allocation with your name at the bottom of it that somebody else has already spent. That is what the written word says about the character of the God you are dealing with, and the same Spirit who breathed those words into Scripture is the one landing them on you now.

And you are held to no requirement to feel glad about the caravan. Nobody gets to hand you that as homework. Feeling and truth run on different timetables, and the truth is doing perfectly well without your feelings having caught it up yet.