What She Is Not Telling Me

She is fourteen and something is going on and she is not going to tell him.

He knows it is not nothing, because she has stopped doing three things she used to do without thinking, and because a fourteen-year-old who is fine does not put her plate in the dishwasher and go straight upstairs four nights running.

He has asked. Of course he has asked.

He has asked in the car, which is supposed to be the good place because nobody has to look at anybody. He has asked at the counter while doing something else, which is the other technique. He has asked directly, sitting down, once, and watched her face close like a door in a draft.

And she has said fine, and she has said nothing, and once she said, not unkindly, dad, and left it there, which was worse than either.

So now he is doing the thing that has taken over his week.

He is looking for the correct question.

Somewhere, he believes, there is a wording. A time of day, a room, an angle. If he can find it, she will tell him, and then he can help.

He has been running that search since Monday. He has run it in the shower and on the way to the tip and at ten past four this morning.

And last night he did it in prayer, and he heard himself doing it, which is why he is reading this. He was not entrusting his daughter to God. He was asking God to supply the wording.

And you know that exactly, because there is somebody you love and you have been hunting for the right thing to say instead of the right person to hand them to.

There is no correct wording, and that is the good news

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom, and there is no method in it anywhere.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in that famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is what turns a famous sentence into an invitation addressed to you.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and it is said in a father's voice about a house that is not working: come and find out whether I am who you have decided I am. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that true in a person rather than merely accurate on a page.

Now the search, and it is worth taking seriously because it comes out of love and not out of control.

A wording is safe. If there is a correct question, then this is a solvable problem, and if it is solvable then it is in your hands, and a father would rather it were in his hands than nowhere. And a man who is good at his job is used to problems having a way in.

But there is a price on that, and you paid some of it at ten past four this morning. If there is a right question, then every night she goes straight upstairs is a night you did not find it, and you will carry that, and you have been carrying it since Monday.

You are dealing with a Father and not a lock, and there has never been a correct wording that operates Him. Jesus put it in the plainest family terms: which of you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion (Luke 11:11). Nobody in that sentence gets the phrasing right. A child says a thing badly and a father is simply not that kind of man. It is the Holy Spirit, and not this page, who takes a line like that off a page and sits it on a stair at four in the morning.

And about the phrasing itself.

Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him, and He has never once withheld anything pending better wording. It is written in Matthew 6:8, said specifically to people who had been taught that more words and better forms improved the odds. And it is written that the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words (Romans 8:26), which is a picture of a man sitting at the bottom of the stairs unable to phrase it, and the answer is not that he needs to phrase it. Somebody else is doing the speaking. His Spirit is what makes that a relief rather than a doctrine.

Now the part about her, and it needs to be said carefully.

God is already in the room she is in, and He was in it before you started looking for a way in. It is written that where can I go from Your Spirit, or where can I flee from Your presence (Psalm 139:7), and the same psalm says He knew her frame when she was being made in secret (Psalm 139:15). Whatever she is not telling you, she is not not telling Him, because there is no version of her hidden from Him. That is not a reason to stop asking her, and nobody here is telling you to stop being her father. It is a reason to stop searching alone.

And one more, which is the honest limit.

Nothing here is going to teach you a prayer that opens her. That is the wording again with a better coat on, and God does not override a person, not even a fourteen-year-old, and the fact that He will not is the same reason she is a person at all.

You are allowed to want to know very badly and to stop hunting for the key, and those two are not in competition. It is written that we have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). A man who says that word has not stopped being a dad. He has remembered that he is somebody's child while he is being one.

And if you find this hard, you are not failing at it. Handing over your own daughter is the hardest thing on this site. Finding it difficult is not evidence about your faith. It is evidence that she is yours.