Twenty Feet From The Kitchen Table

They shut the road at noon and by four o'clock there are three trestle tables end to end down the middle of it, a rope of bunting slung between two upstairs windows, and a lad with one speaker and a very determined opinion about what everybody is dancing to.

Delia is out there. Not politely out there, actually out there, in the middle of it, showing a neighbor's boy how to hold his arms, laughing at a man in a paper hat who cannot count to four in any language. She loves this street. She has lived on it for eleven years and she means every minute of the afternoon.

And twenty feet behind her, through her own front door, on her own kitchen table, there is a letter with a date on it.

She prayed about it this morning. Not a panicked prayer, not a first attempt. She has prayed about this same thing for four years, in the car, in the queue, at the sink, and she prayed about it again today before she came out, plainly, the way you talk to somebody you know.

And nothing came back. No lift, no sentence in her chest, no phone call, no turn in the road. The kettle clicked off. She put her shoes on and came out to the street, and the date on the letter is exactly where it was.

Here is the thing nobody at that table can see, and here is where you come into it. She is not faking the dancing. That is real. What is also real is a small, patient, four year old conclusion that has been building underneath it in the quiet, and it goes like this: everybody else seems to get an answer, so there must be something the matter with me.

You have that conclusion. You did not reason your way to it. It grew.

We are going to call it what it is

Before anything else, one honest thing, because enough of the other kind has already come your way.

You asked, and nothing came. That is what happened. Not "God answered in a way you could not see yet". Not "the answer was no and no is an answer". Not a clever reframing that lets somebody tell you at the end of this article that you got something after all. You asked, it is not answered, and this message is not going to redefine that so it reads better.

The Bible does the same thing, in its own songbook, and it does not tidy it either.

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer, and by night, but I find no rest.Psalm 22:1-2

That is in the hymn book. Somebody set it to music and a nation sang it out loud in company, and three thousand years of people have kept it in there without softening the second verse. And the Lord Jesus, on the worst afternoon in history, took the first line of it into His own mouth, which means the sentence is not a failure of faith. It is a sentence God has already given His people permission to sing.

So take this and hold it. You are allowed to say it was not answered, and saying so out loud is not unbelief and never was. Psalm 22 is the proof that the words exist in Scripture rather than in your weakness, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has kept you talking to God for four years while nothing on that table moved.

What the quiet is not

I am not going to tell you what the silence is for. I do not know. Nobody writing to you knows, and every person who ever handed you a reason for it was guessing with a kind face on.

But I can tell you what it is not, because on this the word is not silent at all.

It is not a bill you failed to settle. It is not a key you have not found. It is not a measurement of how well you believed on any given morning, and there is no amount of anything in your hands that was ever going to move God nearer. Nobody is standing behind that quiet with a scoreboard, and lack has never once been the Lord's verdict on a person.

You are not disqualified. Nothing about your situation has put you outside anything, because the word makes His nearness a matter of His own covenant rather than a payment collected at the door, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been standing with you in the quiet the whole time it went on.

Two facts in one room

Now the second thing, and I want to set it beside the first rather than on top of it, because it is not compensation and I refuse to sell it as such.

It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

Read what that sentence does and does not say. It does not describe the road. It does not promise what is at the end of it, what will arrive, or when. It makes one claim only, and the claim is about position: He goes before, He is with, He does not let go.

Those two facts are both standing in your kitchen this evening. The need is unanswered. God has not moved. The second one does not cancel the first, and I am not going to pretend it does, and you should be suspicious of anybody who tries.

You have His company right now, and it is not a substitute prize handed over because the real thing did not come. Deuteronomy 31:8 puts the not-forsaking in God's own voice, and His Spirit is the One making it true in the room you are standing in, tonight, exactly as things are.