The Question I Have Carried Since I Was Twenty-Two

She is seventy-four and she has had it since she was twenty-two.

It is one question. She could say it in about eleven words. It is not a clever question and it is not obscure, and if a young person brought it to her she would know exactly what to do with it, because she has done that perhaps two hundred times.

She has never asked it out loud.

Not because she is frightened of the answer and not because she thinks it is forbidden. Because for fifty-two years she has been the one people bring things to, and there was never an obvious moment where that reversed.

At twenty-two she was already teaching. By thirty she was the one they rang. Her own mother started asking her things when she was about thirty-five, and that was the end of the last door that had been standing open.

So it went into her the way a splinter goes in, and the skin closed over it, and she is not in pain and never has been.

She simply assumes now that she will die holding it.

And she has begun, in the last year or two, to feel a small resentment about that which she does not like the taste of at all, because she has spent a lifetime telling people that no question is too much, and there is one in her that has never been allowed out of the house.

He put it up where it could be seen

Now, let me take you to a man in that book who does exactly what you have never done, and does it in public, in writing.

He has a complaint. A serious one about the way things are being run, and he does not phrase it carefully.

And then he does something that is worth your attention more than the complaint itself.

Hear this and hold it as already yours rather than as advice: your position never disqualified you from asking, and there is a prophet who puts his question up where it can be seen and then plainly waits. That is not an old woman's opinion, it is what stands written in the second chapter of Habakkuk, and the same Holy Spirit who has been answering through you for fifty-two years is on that porch step with you now.

Read what he says he is going to do.

I will stand at my watch and station myself on the ramparts; I will look to see what he will say to me, and what answer I am to give to this complaint.Habakkuk 2:1

I will stand at my watch.

He does not withdraw the complaint and he does not answer it himself, and those are the only two things most people ever do with a question.

He takes up a position, in the open, and he watches, and he says outright that he expects to be spoken to.

And notice the last clause: what answer I am to give to this complaint. He does not know it yet. He is a prophet, he is the one people come to, and he stands there in public with an unanswered thing and says so.

So take this now rather than at the end of your life: your question is allowed out of the house, because the written word has a prophet stationing himself on the ramparts with a complaint he has not resolved, and the Spirit of God has been answering other people through you for fifty-two years without ever asking you to be empty of questions first.

And the guard, because I will not romanticize this for you.

Nothing here promises you an answer this side of anything. The prophet is spoken to, and you may not be, and I am not going to tell you that seventy-four is the year it finally comes because I do not know that.

What is written simply refuses to make the position of the asker into a disqualification, and the Holy Spirit is not confused about who you are.