The One Question You Have Not Asked Since

Somebody put the biscuits on the windowsill where nobody can reach them without standing up, and so far that is the only thing anyone in the room has complained about.

Twelve of them. Stacking chairs shoved back against the walls, four plastic torsos face up on the carpet tiles, a roll of blue paper towel going round. The instructor is a wiry woman with a lanyard and no patience for people who apologize before they start. She puts them in pairs and kneels them down and counts out loud so they get the rhythm, and every time somebody slows she says the same two words over the counting. Keep going. Keep going.

Then she says the sentence she says on every course, and she says it flat, because it is the most important thing anyone will hear all morning and she has learned not to dress it up.

"The commonest reason people stop is that nothing is happening. Nothing happening is not information. You keep going."

And you are the one down on the carpet tile with your hands stacked and eleven people you see every working day of your life standing round you, and something turns over in your chest that has nothing at all to do with first aid.

Because you asked God something once. Out loud, in your own words, and you meant it more than you have meant anything since. And nothing came. And you did not decide anything, you did not have a crisis, you did not lose your faith. You simply never asked again.

Silence is not a verdict

Let me name the weight before I touch it, because I would rather be accurate than encouraging.

It is not dramatic, and that is the worst of it. Nothing collapsed. You kept the whole house: the giving, the kindness, the reading, the praying for other people's operations and other people's children and other people's marriages. One room shut, that is all. One room, so quietly that nobody noticed, including you, for a long time. And when you did notice the door was shut you did not want to make a fuss, because the thing sounds so small when you say it out loud, and it is the biggest quiet thing in your life.

A house does not fall down because a room stops being used. It just stops being lived in.

Now here is what I am not going to do for you, and I want you to know it is deliberate. I am not going to tell you why it was quiet. I do not know. I could hand you five reasons that sound wise, and any one of them would settle your stomach for a fortnight, and then one day you would work out that the reason was mine and not His, and you would have to take the whole thing down to the footings and start again. I have dismantled a build of my own for less. A reason I invented is worse than the quiet, and I will not put my words in God's mouth to make you feel better this afternoon.

What I will do is tell you what a silence is not.

A verdict is a thing a court hands down. A case is heard, evidence is weighed, a finding is entered, and everybody goes home knowing where they stand. Nothing of the kind happened to you. Nobody read your question out and ruled against it. The only ruling in the whole matter was written by you, on your own, in a quiet you could not bear to leave blank, because a heart will always fill a gap with something rather than nothing.

That is not a fault. That is a heart doing what a heart does. But it does mean the ruling can be taken back, because it was never His.

I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.Habakkuk 2:1

You are standing on the watch even now, and the standing was never conditional on an answer arriving. That is what the word records rather than a comfort I am offering, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps a person at their post through a long quiet.

Read the chapter before that one sometime. The prophet opens his whole book by telling God to His face that he has been crying out and is not being heard. That complaint was not tidied up. It was not softened, apologized for or quietly left out. It is in the Book, in the canon, in the words the man used, and God did not take offense at a man saying out loud that he had asked and heard nothing.

Then look at what he does next, because it is the strangest and best thing in the passage. He does not go quiet. He goes and stands somewhere on purpose. He climbs up on the wall and says he will watch to see what God will say to him, having just told everybody that nothing had been said yet. He is not sulking up there. He is a man putting himself where a reply could reach him. Scripture holds those two things in one hand without the slightest embarrassment, and if the Book can hold them, so can you.

And God did answer him, in His own words and in His own way, and what He said first was: write it down and make it plain.

So let me put down two things, plainly.

God speaks. He did not have a talkative century and then retire. He has never stopped addressing His people, and He has never withdrawn a word He has already said, and the Holy Spirit was not given to the first generation on loan.

And He speaks to you. Not to the general category of believer that you happen to fall inside. Habakkuk did not write what he will say to somebody. He wrote what he will say unto me. I am not going to tell you what God will say to you, or when, and I am not going to rank the ways He does it, and anyone who hands you a system for it is selling you something. What I will tell you is this. Your silence was never evidence of distance. Not once. His face has been turned toward you the whole time you assumed otherwise, and He is not offended that you stopped asking. He is a Father, and a Father knows the difference between rebellion and a bruise.

You have permission to ask it again, and asking again has never once been counted as unbelief. Habakkuk 2:1 has a prophet setting himself upon the tower to see what He will say, and the Holy Spirit is not offended by a repeated question.