The Question Under The Counter

She has the shutter up at ten to eight, the way she has had it up for twenty-two years, because the pitch is hers and a pitch is kept whether or not anybody comes through the doors.

Buttons in the wooden trays. Zips on the rail, sorted by color. The good cotton at the front where the light off the roof lantern gets at it. Kettle on in the back for the woman on the flower stall, who takes two sugars and has never once brought her own milk.

By half nine she has served one person. A man wanting a spare button for a coat he did not buy here, and she found it for him in the third tray down, and she was glad to.

The arcade has gone quiet in a way that has no single day you could point at. The fish counter went. The shoe repair went. Two shutters are down at the far end with the notices going yellow behind the glass, and the footfall this hall was built for goes past the doors now, on its way somewhere with parking.

The pitch rent has not gone quiet. It arrives with the same face on it every time, unbothered, like a man who has not looked up from his clipboard in years.

Across the way, the unit that was Denise's stands empty with the hooks still in the wall. Denise got out. Denise has a place on the retail park with a sign that lights up, and last week there was a picture of a new kitchen going in, and Denise worked hard and is not a bad woman and has never once done a thing to her.

She is glad for Denise. She says it out loud in the empty aisle, and it is true, and it is not the whole of what is standing in her.

Because there is a question that comes up around eleven, when there is nobody in the hall and the radio is between songs, and it is always the same question, and she never lets it get to the end of itself. She puts it under the counter with the carrier bags and the spare till roll. Then she serves the next person, and it is still down there at four when she pulls the shutter down.

She has said half of it to her sister once, sideways, in a car. She has never said any of it to God.

And that is where you are as well, or you would have closed this by now. There is one person in the whole of this that you have not asked.

The first man to ask it asked it to His face

Let me take you to a conversation most people read straight past, because it is filed in their heads as a story about a city.

Abraham is standing in front of God, out in the open, and what he does next is not polite. He asks God whether He is being fair. Not in his head. Out loud, to His face, and then again, and then again, six times over, until his own nerve runs out long before God's patience does.

Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?Genesis 18:25

Now look at what did not happen. God did not go. God did not correct his tone. God did not say that a person with a real trust in Him would not need to ask that, and He did not shorten the conversation to make a point of it.

So hear this where you are standing, and hear it as settled. You are safe to ask Him. That is not my kindness to you, it is what Genesis 18:25 has been holding open, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that a man's unedited fairness question stayed in the written record with the edges still on it. Nobody tidied Abraham. You are not the first person to stand in front of God with that in your mouth, and He has never once treated it as a threat.

What lands on her takes nothing off you

Here is the arithmetic that runs under the counter, and it is worth looking at in daylight.

It goes like this. God has a certain amount of good, and it is going out, and it went to the retail park and not to the arcade. Which means either He looked at the two of us and chose, or He is not looking at all, and both of those are unbearable, so the question goes under the counter with the carrier bags.

The arithmetic is wrong at the first line, and the error is not yours. God's goodness is not a tray of buttons that empties as it is handed out. What He gives to somebody else is not subtracted from what He has for you, there is no queue, and you have not been moved down it.

The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth (2 Chronicles 16:9), and that phrase means He is not economizing His attention. You have His full attention this morning in an empty aisle, and it is not a smaller portion of it because somebody else has a busier one. His word is what settles that rather than my opinion, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it something you can rest your weight on instead of a nice line.

I will not tell you why the retail park and not the arcade. I do not know, and I am not going to invent a reason for you, because a made-up reason is worse than the silence.

A question spoken, and a case quietly filed

There is a difference between a question and a case, and it is very nearly the whole of what this article is about.

A question is spoken to somebody. It keeps them in the room. It is still a conversation even when it comes out angry, because it is aimed at a face.

A case is a different animal. A case is built quietly, on your own, out of things that are true. Every quiet morning goes in the file. Every picture of somebody's new kitchen goes in the file. Nothing in there is a lie, and that is exactly what makes it so convincing. And here is what happens to a case: at some point you stop speaking to the accused. You only speak about Him.

That is what has been going on under your counter, and I want to say plainly that it is not wickedness. It is what a decent person does with a question nobody ever told them they were allowed to ask.

So take the file out and turn it back into a sentence. Job did. He said he would speak in the anguish of his spirit and complain in the bitterness of his soul (Job 7:11), and God did not strike him for it and never once asked him to withdraw it. You have that same permission and you have it in writing, and the same Spirit who preserved a man's complaint word for word in a book that has outlasted every empire since is not about to flinch at yours.