Ask Me Again

Twenty tables, and a class of nine year olds let loose among them, one child to each older person, all of them clutching a folded sheet from school with the same three questions on it. The hall smells of gravy and floor polish. Somebody's hearing aid is whistling and nobody minds.

The boy at his table gets straight to it. Name. Where you were born. And then question three, read out carefully in his best reading voice: Tell me about a time somebody helped you.

And the man goes blank.

Not because nothing occurs to him. Because everything occurs to him and none of it looks like an answer: a job, a bus, a woman at a door, a night that went past. He has been a believer since he was twenty six. He would tell you God is faithful in the way you would tell someone the sea is salty. And a child with a pencil has just asked him to point at one, and he cannot find where to put his finger.

"I'll have a think," he says.

The boy, who has no idea he has done anything, writes thinking in the box and goes to find the biscuits.

And you are that man at that table. Somebody could ask you tonight where God has been good to you and you would say something true and general and slightly too fast, and then you would go quiet in the car and wonder why the general answer came so easily and the particular one would not come at all.

Nobody is marking this

Before a single word more, let me take the exam paper off the table.

There is a famous line in Malachi where God says prove me now, and it has been read out to a great many people over the years about half a second before somebody wanted something from them. Read it in its own chapter and the shape of it turns round completely. God is the one offering to be found true. He is the one saying test me, look at me, see whether I hold. Nothing in that invitation was ever a task set for you, and there is nothing being asked of you here either, not now, not at the end, not in a quiet voice at the bottom of the page.

Which means what follows is not an audit of your gratitude. Nobody is checking your workings.

Now let me name the weight, because it is real and it is not what people assume. The ache in that hall is not ingratitude. It is a suspicion, and it is one of the loneliest a person carries: that your life has been ordinary, and that ordinary means unvisited. That God has been generous with people who have a story, and merely patient with you.

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

Jeremiah wrote that sitting in a ruin. He did not write it because he had spotted three good things. He wrote it because mercy that arrives every single morning is the hardest kind to notice, exactly like breathing.

So hear this over that table. You are not a man God skipped, and the blankness in front of that child was never evidence about you. Lamentations 3:23 says the mercy comes new every morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and turns the lights on in a room a person has walked through in the dark for years.

Samuel put down a stone, and he put it down afterwards

There is a moment in Israel's story worth standing in.

Then Samuel took a stone and set it up and called its name Ebenezer, saying, Till now the Lord has helped us.1 Samuel 7:12

Notice when he does it. Afterwards. The help had already happened; the stone came later, and the stone did not cause anything. It was a marker put in the ground so that nobody would have to rely on memory, which is the least trustworthy thing any of us owns.

And notice how modest the claim is. Not the Lord will always. Not this proves the pattern. Till now. Up to this point. That is all Samuel says, and he says it as a man who knew perfectly well that tomorrow was God's business and not his to forecast.

You have permission to be that modest and it is a relief rather than a limitation. Till now is a complete sentence in Scripture and it needs no ending bolted onto it, and the Spirit who inspired that line is not asking you to turn what you find into a prediction. Look back at what happened. Do not look forward and make it a rule.

I am not naming yours

Here is where an article like this usually goes wrong, and I am not going to do it to you.

Somebody hands you their own examples, and they are lovely, and every one of them belongs to their life and not to yours. You end up scanning your years for something that resembles theirs, find nothing, and conclude that God did less for you than He did for the person writing. That is worse than the blank page you started with.

So I will name nothing. You have a memory the Holy Spirit has been in for longer than you have been paying attention, and He does not need my suggestions to bring one up (John 14:26). Written into the Gospel is the promise that He brings things to remembrance, and remembering is His actual work, not a talent you either have or lack.

Sit somewhere. Ask Him. Then wait longer than feels sensible, because the first thing that comes is usually the general answer you already know, and the true one comes about ninety seconds after you would ordinarily have given up.