Their Kitchen Wall Was Dry

The kettle in this kitchen is one of the loud ones, and Dan is standing beside it with Nell on his hip, because she has decided that the kettle is the most interesting object in the house and will not be talked out of it.

Sunday, and a good one. Michael and Anna do a roast most weeks and they always mean the invitation. Anna made a lemon cake nobody asked her for, and Michael has spent twenty minutes on the floor letting a nine month old take his glasses off him.

Dan is leaning against the wall by the door while the kettle works itself up, his free hand flat on the plaster at about shoulder height, and he has been standing like that longer than he realized.

The wall is dry. It is warm, and it is dry, and it is an ordinary painted wall doing nothing at all, and his hand will not move off it.

At home that same wall, the one behind the cot on the side that faces the weather, comes away on your fingers. They have moved the cot twice. There is a bloom above the skirting that is back four days after he cleans it, and the man the landlord sent stood in the doorway and said condensation, and said they wanted to open the windows more.

Here is the trouble with this afternoon. Anna is lovely. She asks after Nell's sleep and then waits for the whole answer. Michael would hand them anything they asked for and would be hurt to learn they had needed it. There is nobody in this kitchen to be angry at.

The sentence arrives anyway, finished, at the exact moment the kettle clicks off. Why them.

He does not say it. He carries it home on the bus with the changing bag on his knee, and later he is on the bedroom floor going along the skirting with kitchen roll before bath time, and Hayley says something ordinary from the doorway about the immersion, and the sentence is still in the room like a smell you cannot place. He has not said it to her. He has certainly not said it to God.

You have a version of it, or you would not have opened this, and you know exactly which kitchen yours started in.

That sentence is a question, not a crime

Let me be exact about what happened by that kettle. A question formed. That is all that happened. It was not a decision about God, it was not disloyalty, and it was not the start of you going bad. It came because you can see, and because your hand was flat on a wall that behaves the way walls are supposed to behave.

What happened next is the part worth looking at. It got put somewhere, and it has been kept there ever since, and questions do not keep well.

This is what goes on in the dark of that cupboard. A question that never gets asked does not stay a question. It thickens. It collects, quietly and efficiently, and after long enough it is not a question any more, it is a file, and every dry wall you have ever had your hand on has gone into it. Nobody sits down and decides to build a case against God. It assembles itself out of unasked questions, in a person far too loyal to say anything.

So hear this before we go one step further, because it changes what the rest of this is for. You are not in trouble for the sentence you did not say in that kitchen. Scripture has an entire congregation put a rougher version of it to music and sing it in the house of God, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the words stayed in the collection rather than being tidied out of it (Psalm 44:23).

They set that question to music and sang it in church

Psalm 44 is not a private diary entry. It is a choir piece. It has a heading on it that names the sons of Korah and hands it to the man who ran the music, which means it was sung out loud, in the house of God, by the whole congregation, on purpose, more than once.

The first half of it goes over the good years, what God did for their fathers, all of it true and all of it gratefully said. Then it turns, and what comes out of a room full of worshippers is this: all of that has come on us anyway, and we have not forgotten You, and we have not dealt falsely in Your covenant. We are a reproach to the people next door and a byword to the ones round about us. And then, straight to His face:

Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arise, cast us not off for ever. Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our affliction?Psalm 44:23 and 24

Take in what is actually on that page. They are telling God, in a service, in unison, that He looks asleep. They are naming the neighbors. They are not opening with an apology for their tone, and there is no verse at the end where somebody takes the words back.

And it survived. Somebody set that to a tune. Somebody copied the words by hand, and somebody else copied them again a century later, and the man responsible for what got sung in the house of God looked at those two lines and kept them in. The complaint was not a lapse in the collection. It was kept on purpose, so that a person standing exactly where you are standing would open the book and find the ground already marked as allowed.

So take that where you are sitting now. You have a God who does not step back when the question leaves your mouth. That is not a warm opinion I hold about Him, it is what the written record shows Him accepting from a whole congregation with the instruments going, and His Spirit is the one who lands an old song on a man on a bus with a changing bag on his knee.

He is not running a queue

There is an arithmetic underneath your sentence, and it is worth having up on the table. The words why them assume a fixed quantity. They assume a queue with a certain amount at the front of it, so that the dry wall in Michael and Anna's kitchen came out of a supply, and that what landed in their house is therefore no longer available for yours.

I am not going to hand you a reason for why their wall is dry and yours is not. I do not have one. The reasons people offer at moments like this are mostly invented on the spot to make a silence less awkward, and not one of the ones you have already been handed survived the walk to the car.

What I can tell you is what God is not, and it is this. He is not a supply with a queue in front of it. His goodness is not a quantity that runs down as it is handed out, and there is no ledger anywhere in heaven where a good Sunday in one kitchen is entered against a wet wall in another. You are dealt with personally by a God who has never once had to check what was left before He was kind to somebody, and the written word says He gives to all liberally and does not reproach anybody for asking (James 1:5), and His Spirit is the one who makes that read as true rather than merely nice.

And the sons of Korah are not a one off. Psalm 10 opens by asking God why He stands so far off and hides Himself in times of trouble. Psalm 13 asks how long, four times over, in four lines. I have spent my life among old copies of these things, and the striking thing about the collection is not the praise, which you would expect, but how much of the awkward material a careful scribe left exactly where he found it. Nobody was smoothing it for the reader's comfort, and nobody is smoothing it for yours.