Seven Times Up the Hill

She asked three times and then stopped, and the stopping had nothing to do with faith.

The first time was proper and considered. The second, about four months later, felt reasonable, because circumstances had shifted a little and it seemed fair to raise it again. The third, the following spring, she prefaced with an apology.

That preface is where it ended.

Because she heard herself apologizing to God for bringing something up again, and something in her recoiled, and she decided that a person who has to say sorry for asking has probably asked enough.

That was two years ago and she has not raised it since.

She would tell you she is at peace about it, and she is partly telling the truth. But there is a very specific quality to the way she does not mention it, and it is not peace. It is manners.

Here is the sentence underneath, and it took her until this year to see it.

She has been treating God like somebody who would find her tiresome.

Not unkind. Not unwilling. Tiresome. A person of limited patience with a woman who keeps coming back to the same subject, the way a colleague's face changes when you raise a thing for the fourth time.

The prophet sends him up again, and again

There is a scene on Carmel that most people know for the fire and skip for the ending, and the ending is the part for you.

And said to his servant, Go up now, look toward the sea. And he went up, and looked, and said, There is nothing. And he said, Go again seven times.1 Kings 18:43

Read what happens between those sentences. A man walks up a hill, looks at an empty sea, comes down and reports nothing. And the answer he receives is not then it is not coming. It is go again.

Seven times. Which means six reports of nothing, one after another, from a man walking up and down a hill in front of somebody who is not impatient with him.

And Elijah does not apologize for asking twice. He does not explain himself at the fourth. There is no preface anywhere in that passage, and nobody in it treats repetition as bad manners.

You are welcome to come back a fourth and a fifth time, and coming back is not pestering. That is what the word actually shows, not a liberty I am extending to you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a rule of manners off a woman who has been apologizing for asking.

Where the manners came from

Now the kind part, because you did not invent that rule and it did not come from nowhere.

It came from people.

Everybody learns, quite young, that there is a number of times you can ask a human being for something before their face changes. It is one of the first social skills anybody develops, and it is genuinely useful, and by adulthood it runs entirely below thinking.

And then it gets applied to God, without anybody deciding to, because it is the only model of asking anybody has.

That is not a theological error you committed. It is a piece of ordinary human wiring reaching somewhere it does not fit.

And nothing about repeating a request has ever wearied Him. Scripture has a prophet sending a man up a hill seven times without one word of apology, and the Holy Spirit is not weary of a woman with one subject.

Say plainly that you will ask again

Here is the practical piece, and it has a second half most people leave off.

Ask the old thing out loud, in the present tense.

And then say, out loud, that you will be asking again.

That second sentence is the one that breaks the rule. It states, deliberately, that this is not a final approach made once and then dropped politely. It is the fourth trip up the hill, and there will be a fifth.

You are able to say that plainly, and saying it is not presumption. He promised that the one who asks receives, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a courteous woman able to announce a fifth request.

And this article will not tell you why the first three were quiet, or what is on the sea. Neither is mine to say. What is mine to say is that six reports of nothing did not close that passage.