The Sound Under The Floor

The airport holding park has its own weather. Cars nose to tail under the sodium lights, engines off because fuel is fuel, every windscreen fogged from the inside by a man sleeping sitting up.

He does not sleep. He listens.

Because somewhere under the floor of his car, back near the offside rear, there is a sound that was not there in the spring. It comes in at one speed and drops out at another, and in between it keeps a steady beat, patient as a metronome, and he has learned the whole shape of it the way you learn a song you never chose.

The garage told him what it is. The garage was kind about it. Kind is not the same as cheap, so the sound is still under the floor, and he drives at the speed where it goes quiet, which is not the speed the road was built for.

His job comes through and he takes it. A family, two cases and a folded pushchair, going somewhere with a sea in it. The father apologizes for the hour and helps him with the boot. The mother laughs at something the little one says against her shoulder, half asleep. They tip him, and they mean it.

He lifts their cases in over an axle he cannot afford to mend, and he wishes them a lovely time, and he means that too.

Then he takes the ring road back, empty, no fare, and the beat under the floor keeps its time, and the question comes up out of the dark the way it always does at this hour, fully formed and word perfect, because it has had years of practice.

Why them.

Not said to God. Said to the windscreen, where it never has to be answered, and where it can quietly go on becoming something else.

And it has been going on becoming something else in you as well, or you would not have opened this at this hour.

Your question is already in the Bible

Before we go near what the question does to a person, I want to show you where it lives. It lives in Scripture, in the mouth of a man God Himself called upright.

Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power? Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes.Job 21:7 and 8

That is a man saying out loud, in front of God and in front of three friends who wished he would not, that the arithmetic does not work. Not once does God tell him to take it back. At the end of the whole book it is the friends who get corrected, the ones with a tidy reason for everything, and the man with the question is the one God says spoke of Him what was right (Job 42:7).

So hear this before another mile goes under you. You have the standing to ask God that question tonight, out loud, in your own words, at whatever hour you are reading this, because the Holy Spirit is not scandalized by a sentence He Himself carried into the written record and left sitting there in plain view for you to find.

I am not speaking my own opinion over you. I am handing you back something God put in His own book deliberately, and there is nothing in it that needs softening before you are allowed to touch it.

Nobody in your comparison is a villain

Here is where your version is harder than the one in Job, and I do not think anybody has ever said that to you.

Job was comparing himself with the wicked. He had a target. He could be angry at somebody and feel entirely justified doing it.

You cannot. The father who apologized for the hour is a good man. The friend whose kitchen got done is generous, and would help you tomorrow if you asked her. Nobody in your comparison is a villain, and that is exactly why the anger has nowhere to land, and anger with nowhere to land goes upward by default.

Asaph knew it. He wrote a whole psalm about it and he did not tidy it up either: my feet were almost gone, my steps had well nigh slipped (Psalm 73:2). Almost. Well nigh. A worship leader, in the house of God, half a step from going over the edge about precisely this.

You are standing where Asaph stood, and that is company rather than a verdict. The same Spirit who kept him upright with his mouth full of that question is the One holding you steady in a holding car park under the sodium lights, and Psalm 73:23 says plainly what had been true the entire time he thought he was slipping: thou hast holden me by my right hand.

An unanswered beat sets the tempo

I keep time for a living, so let me tell you what a beat does when nothing ever answers it. It does not stop. It goes underneath everything else and it sets the tempo for whatever gets played over the top.

A question said to a windscreen has no listener. That is the whole trouble with it. A question needs somebody on the other end or it cannot stay a question, and what it turns into instead is a file.

You know the file. The drive with the new car on it. The photographs from the coast. The lad who started the same week you did and works indoors now. None of it was ever collected on purpose. It accrues the way dust accrues, and one night you notice you have stopped asking God anything at all and started keeping a record of Him instead.

You are held right now, in the middle of that, by a God who invites the very thing you have been swallowing. His word says pour out your heart before him (Psalm 62:8), and His Spirit is the one who carries what you pour, so the pouring has never once waited on you finding a respectful way to word it first.

And none of this is a fault in you. A man who asks the same question for years without an answer and keeps driving is not a man with a small faith. He is a man whose faith has been doing heavy work in the dark with nobody watching.