The Question I Would Not Take Inside

The number on the screen above the desk is two behind his, and it has not moved since he sat down.

He has the folder flat on his knees. Inside it is the second certificate, from the course that finished in the summer, and underneath that the first one, from the course three years before. Two courses, one folder. He keeps them together because they take up less room that way.

Fifty-eight. He says it in his head the way a man says something about the weather, with no heat in it, because it is simply the number that goes at the top of every form now.

Two chairs down there is a lad of about twenty-two with his knee going. The lad is not the problem. The lad has forty years ahead of him to get it wrong in.

The problem is a man he stood beside for eleven weeks on the first course. Same hands, same jokes, same standard of work, and on Tuesday he saw his van on the ring road with a name painted along the side of it and a ladder on the roof.

And the question runs. It runs the whole time the screen is not moving, and there is no anger in it, which is the strange part. It is a sum that will not come out. Why him.

Then he does what he has taught himself to do. He folds it, and puts it under the certificates, and takes it home, and leaves it outside the prayer. He will pray about work. He will not ask that.

Somewhere along the way he picked up the idea that a man does not carry that question into the room where God is. So he goes in without it every time, and it is still sitting on the chair when he comes out.

I think you have been doing the same thing, and I think you have been doing it for years.

The question you leave in the corridor

Let me say the first thing plainly, because you have waited a long while for somebody to say it to you.

That question is welcome in the room, and you are welcome to bring it in the words it actually arrives in rather than in the tidied version you would use at a prayer meeting. I am not handing you my own opinion about God's manners. Scripture kept one man's version of that exact question in the permanent record, and the Holy Spirit is the reason nobody ever quietly edited it out for being awkward.

What you have been doing instead is protecting Him from it, as though the Maker of the world needed shielding from an honest man in a plastic chair. It is not irreverence that keeps the question outside. It is care of the wrong kind, and its cost is that you go in to Him with a piece of yourself left in the corridor.

And a question held silently for years does not stay a question. It settles. It goes down like sediment and hardens into a case, and one ordinary morning a man notices he is not asking God anything any more, he is keeping a file on Him. That is the thing this message exists to stop, and it is stopped by speaking.

A prophet said it to His face

Here is the man Scripture kept.

Righteous are You, O Lord, when I complain to You; yet I would plead my case before You. Why does the way of the wicked prosper? Why do all who are treacherous thrive?Jeremiah 12:1

Read the order in it. He says Righteous are You first. Then he says the rest, and the rest is not softened by so much as a syllable: why do the people who ought not to be doing well go on doing well. Both halves come out in one breath, and God does not withdraw from him, does not rebuke him for the asking, and does not take the calling off him in the morning.

You have the same standing that man had, and you have it on better ground than he did, because you are in Christ and the way in was opened for you rather than earned by you. The written word calls that way a throne of grace and tells you to come to it boldly (Hebrews 4:16), which is a strange word to use about a throne and it was not chosen carelessly. The same Spirit who carried that prophet's sentence into Scripture is living in you, and He is not going to be shocked by your version of it said in a waiting room.

Now hold both halves the way he held them, because most of us manage only one at a time. Some can say Righteous are You and never get as far as the question, and they go quiet, and then they go hard. Some get to the question and lose the first half on the way, and then there is nobody left to say it to. Jeremiah says both, and the order is not a technique. It is a man telling the truth to somebody he still trusts.

And notice what God does not do. He does not explain, and I am not going to invent an explanation on His behalf, because that is how a person ends up carrying a reason that is not true on top of a shortfall that is. I do not know why the other man has the van. What I know is what happened to the one who asked: he was not struck down, he was not dismissed, and he was still God's man the next morning.

What is on their table takes nothing off yours

There is a thought underneath the question doing more damage than the question ever did. It is the thought that there is a fixed amount of God's goodness in circulation, and that somebody else has been handed your portion of it.

That is not how He works and it is not how any of it is written. His goodness is not a tray going round a room with a set number of things on it. You have a Father who is not rationing Himself in your town, and what is set in front of that other man has never once come off your table. Scripture says every good and perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning (James 1:17), and His Spirit in you is the down payment on an inheritance that cannot be handed to anybody else instead (Ephesians 1:14).

And nobody here is asking you to be glad about it. That is a thing said from platforms and it lands like a slap on a man who has sat two courses through. You are not required to feel any particular way about another person's week in order to be right with God, and nothing in the written word makes your standing with Him depend on your feelings about somebody else's ladder. His Spirit works in your heart at a pace He set Himself, and He is not waiting at the door with a checklist.