The Question You Stopped Asking Out Loud

It is fourteen minutes past two and he has typed the question three times.

Each time he gets about eleven words in, reads it back, and takes it out again, because even in a search box, even with nobody in the house awake, there is a way of phrasing it that feels like a betrayal and he cannot find the version that does not.

He is not a cynic. That is what makes this so lonely. He runs the sound desk on a Sunday, he prays with his kids, he has given years of Tuesday evenings to that building, and he means all of it. He is not looking for the door.

He is looking for one honest answer to one honest thing, at two in the morning, on a phone, in the dark, because the phone is the only place in his life where nobody's face changes.

Because he did ask a person, once. About a year ago. He asked it in a front room with eight people in it and the mugs still going round, and he said it lightly, the way you say a thing you have been carrying for months.

Nobody was cruel. That is worth saying, because he has told himself since that they were, and they were not.

Somebody said a verse. Somebody said, "That is a really good question," in the voice people use when a question is not going to be answered. Somebody else laughed and said the enemy loves to plant those. And then, quite quickly, the conversation was about something else, and a woman started talking about a rota.

He drove home and he did not go back the following week.

He goes now. He goes most weeks. He has just never said anything like it out loud again, in any room, to anybody.

He was not sent away for saying it

I am not going to answer your question in this message. I want to be straight with you about that in the first line rather than let you get to the end and feel it slide past.

I do not know which one it is. And even if I did, the tidy answer is not what you came for, because you have already found the tidy answers, at two in the morning, and the tidy ones are exactly what have made you feel most alone. A closed answer handed to an open person is how somebody learns to stop mentioning things.

So here is what I am going to do instead, and it is worth more.

There is a father in the record with a son in a very bad way, and he says something to Jesus that has been keeping honest people in the room for two thousand years. He does not say I have resolved this. He does not say I have no problem here. He says two things in one breath that most religious rooms will tell you cannot both be true.

I believe. Help my unbelief.Mark 9:24

Say it slowly. It is not a contradiction; it is an accurate description of a human being. He believed. He also had a hole in it. He put both on the table at once, out loud, in public, in front of a crowd, on the worst day of his life.

And now the thing I actually want you to see. Nothing bad happened to him for saying it.

He is not corrected. He is not told to come back when he has settled it. Nobody says that is a really good question and turns to the rota. Christ does not require the sentence to be withdrawn before He moves, and He does not treat the crack in the man's confidence as the reason to withhold anything.

That is your standing, and I want you to have it before anything else. You are not on probation. Nobody is grading the percentage. That is what stands written: Mark 9:24 keeps a man saying both halves in one breath, and the Holy Spirit has never once put anybody on probation for the second half.

Now, the tradition you are inside of, and something I would like to hand back to you, because it is yours and I think somebody took it off you.

This thing did not begin as an argument. It began with people saying what they had seen, to hostile rooms, at cost, and among the very first records they left, they kept the man who said he would not believe it unless he could put his own hand in it. They did not edit him out. They did not tidy him into somebody more suitable. They wrote his doubt down and left it in the family album for every generation after them to read.

Now ask yourself why a movement would do that, if being unsettled were the disqualification.

It is a strange kind of comfort and it is the real kind. The doubter has been on the guest list from the start.

And here is where I will not go, because going there would be doing to you what that front room did.

I am not going to promise you certainty. I could probably write a paragraph tonight that would hold you for a fortnight, and then you would read something else, somewhere else, and it would come apart, and you would conclude that everyone including me has been managing you. The kind of ground I would rather give you is smaller and does not do that.

You have enough to stand on. You do not have enough to stop asking. Both of those are true at the same time, both of them are allowed, and a faith that has room for the second one is not a weaker faith. It is a faith that will survive the next thing you read. What is written keeps I do believe and help my unbelief in the same sentence without correcting either half, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a person while both are true.