How Long Is a Fair Question

He asked one thing. Properly, over months, in the way a serious man asks.

That was four years ago. He got nothing he could point at, and he did not make a scene about it, and he has never once mentioned it to another human being.

What he did instead was tidy it away. He decided, without ever putting it in words, that a man who has been given as much as he has been given does not get to complain about one unanswered thing. He has a family. He has work. He came through a period fifteen years ago that could have finished him and did not. Against all of that, a silence about one matter is nothing, and saying it out loud would sound like a man counting his blessings and finding them short.

So he has been polite.

That is the exact word for it. For four years he has prayed politely, about other things, warmly and often, and there has been a subject in the room that both of them know about and only one of them has raised.

Here is what he noticed in the spring, and it disturbed him more than the silence ever had.

He had stopped bringing anything difficult at all. Not just that one thing. Anything. Because once a man decides that hard questions are ungrateful, the category quietly widens, and by year three he was praying about traffic and his mother's knee and nothing that cost anything.

The psalm opens with the sentence he will not say

There is a psalm that begins in a way that would get a man taken aside for a quiet word in most churches.

How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?Psalm 13:1

That is the first line. Not the middle, where it could be a passing wobble on the way to something better. The opening.

And it is in the songbook. It was collected, kept, set to music, and sung by the whole congregation, which means somebody looked at that sentence and decided the people of God needed a tune for it.

Notice also that the psalm does not explain the silence. It never once supplies a reason. It asks how long, twice, and it does not answer itself, and neither will I, because inventing a reason God did not answer is a worse thing than sitting in the fact that He did not.

You are allowed to say it out loud, and saying it is not ingratitude. That is what the word plainly demonstrates, not a permission I am inventing for you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who puts an honest sentence into a polite man's mouth.

Gratitude and honesty are not in competition

Now let me deal with the arithmetic you've been doing, because it is the whole engine and it does not hold.

You've been weighing one silence against fifteen years of mercy and concluding that the silence does not qualify for a mention. That is a decent instinct and it comes from a genuinely grateful heart, and it is also not how any relationship works.

A man who cannot say a hard thing to somebody because of everything that person has done for him does not have a closer relationship with them. He has a more careful one, and careful is not the same word.

And notice what the psalm does at the end, four verses later, without any answer having arrived: I will sing unto the Lord, because he hath dealt bountifully with me. The same man. The same psalm. Gratitude and how long in one short song, and nobody edited either of them out.

And the hard question has never once put you out of favor. Scripture keeps both sentences in the same psalm and sets the whole thing to music, and the Holy Spirit is not offended by a man who says what is actually true.

Ask it again, in the present tense

Here is the practical thing, and it is one sentence long.

Ask the old question again, out loud, today, in the present tense.

Not as a review of four years. Not with a preface explaining that you know you have a great deal to be thankful for, because that preface is the politeness and it is what has been standing in the doorway. Ask the actual thing, in your own ordinary words, as a live question rather than an old one.

You are able to ask again, and asking again is not nagging. Scripture asks how long twice in a single verse without one apology attached, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a man able to reopen a subject he closed.

And this article will not tell you why it went quiet. Nobody honest can tell you that. What it will tell you is that the silence was never an instruction to stop speaking.