Twenty to ten on a Tuesday and the fryers are on for nobody.
She wipes a counter that is already clean. Out the back her husband is cutting the last of the onions for a night that is not going to need them. The extractor hums. The window has gone dark enough to work as a mirror, and past her own reflection in it she can see the place three doors down, and the queue coming out of its door, and a lad pulling away on a moped with a bag on his back.
The meter runs whether anybody comes in or not. The standing charge does not care what day it is. It is running while she wipes the clean counter and it will run while she sleeps and it is running now.
And here is the thing she does on every quiet night, and she has never once said it out loud to anybody, including him.
She looks at that queue and she asks the question. Why them. They are not bad people and she is not going to pretend they are. They do not pray, as far as she knows. They have never stood in a dark shop at twenty to ten asking God for a Tuesday. And their door does not stop going.
She asks the window. Every single time. Never Him.
And the reason it goes to the glass instead of to God is that she is frightened of what will be true about Him if she asks Him properly and nothing comes back.
That is you as well, or you would not have opened this. So let us get that question off the glass.
The question is already in the Bible
I want this said before anything else, because it has been carried quietly for a long time and it has been getting heavier the whole way.
The question you ask the window is in Scripture. It is in there in the mouth of a prophet, put to God's face, with no apology attached to it and nothing spiritual done to it first.
Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?Jeremiah 12:1
Look at the order of it. He tells God that God is righteous. Then, in the very next breath, he says he would like a word about how this is being run. Both halves, out loud, to His face, in the same sentence.
And God does not strike him for it. God does not go cold on him. The reply comes back in the following verses and the conversation carries on for the rest of the book.
So you are not standing outside the door holding something too ugly to bring in. You are holding a question the Holy Spirit saw fit to write into His word and leave standing there, and it has been sitting in the permanent record ever since, waiting for the exact Tuesday you are having.
What the glass does to a question
A question asked to God stays a question. A question asked to a dark window turns into something else, and it turns slowly enough that you never catch the day it changed.
It becomes a case. Evidence goes into it. The new van on the forecourt. The holiday photographs. The way somebody said they had been really blessed lately and meant absolutely nothing by it. Not one of those items is a lie, and stacked up in the dark with nobody to hand them to, they stop being a question and start being a conclusion about God.
I am not going to call that bitterness and I am not going to tell you off for it. It is simply what happens to any question that has nowhere to go.
So here is what is already true, and take it as finished rather than as advice. You have somewhere to put it tonight. Psalm 62:8 says pour out your heart before Him, and the word is pour, not present, not phrase, not tidy it up first, and the Holy Spirit who lives in you is not standing at the door of that prayer checking your tone before He lets it through.
Nothing they were given came out of your account
Here is the one piece of the arithmetic at the glass that is actually wrong, and it is not the observation. The observation is accurate. Their door does keep going and yours does not, and nobody gets to talk you out of what you can see with your own eyes.
The wrong bit is the subtraction. You have been reading their full shop as though it were made out of your empty one, as though there were a fixed quantity of favor in the world and theirs had come off your pile.
There is no queue. God is not working down a list with a limited amount in the van, and what He hands to somebody three doors down is not taken off what He has for you. You are not further back in a line. You were never in a line at all, because the God who is dealing with you is dealing with you personally, and Psalm 139:16 says He wrote your days in His book before there was one of them, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in the room with you now.
And I am not going to hand you a reason for the difference, because I have not got one and nobody honest has. Job asked why the wicked live and grow old and become mighty in power, in Job 21:7, and the book he is in never answers him. It just keeps him. That is not a dodge. It is the most honest thing on this page, and I would rather leave you holding a question than holding a reason I made up.
The breakthrough is the direction, and that is the whole of it. Not the answer. The direction.
Jeremiah asked and what came back was not an explanation. Read Jeremiah 12 to the end and God never tells him why the wicked prosper. What He does is keep talking to him. The relationship comes through the question intact, and the question stays in the book, unanswered and unrepented of, for every believer since who has needed to know it was allowed.
You are allowed. Hebrews 4:16 says come boldly to the throne of grace, and boldly is the word that was chosen, and grace is what the throne is made of. You have that boldness right now, tonight, in a dark shop, and you have it in Christ rather than on the strength of the week you have had. It is not the wording that gets you in. It is the Holy Spirit inside you, carrying what is written straight to a Father who was never braced for it.
And when the question goes to Him instead of to the glass, something happens that nobody can promise you about the money and anybody can promise you about this. The question stays a question. It does not get to become the thing you believe about God.
Declare this over yourself
Say these where you are standing. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ, and it is not issued on the strength of what is in the till tonight. Scripture is the ground under every word of it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely brave. What God does about the money is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Standing charge, you run while I sleep and you have no authority to run the ledger on my life. Jeremiah told God to His face that He is righteous and then asked Him straight out why the wicked prosper, and the written word kept both halves of that sentence standing. In the name of Jesus I name you honestly, and I hand you nothing that belongs to God.
- Conclusion I came to at the dark glass, you are not God's opinion of me and you never were. His word says I may come boldly to the throne of grace, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries me in with the question still in my hands. What I believe about His heart towards me is settled by what is written, and it is not settled by a queue three doors down.
- Lord, You are righteous, and I am saying that first the way Jeremiah 12:1 says it first. I thank You, because You have kept me asking You instead of asking the glass, and Your Spirit is the reason this question ever found its way to Your face. The question is Yours now, and I am not carrying it back to the window.
Jeremiah 12:1
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