Eleven Years of Studying It

The plates are stacked and drying and the screen door is propped open with a brick, because it is the last week of August and the house has been holding heat since noon.

He is wiping the same spot on the counter. Out on the porch the kids are arguing about a card game in the way that is not really arguing. His wife has her back against the doorframe with a dish towel over her shoulder and she is looking at him, and she has been looking at him for about eleven seconds, which in this kitchen is a long time.

Then she says it. Not loud. Not with the tone that means a fight is starting.

She says: do you want it to stop?

And he knows exactly what she means, because there is only one it. It is the thing that came out of him on Tuesday at the table when the milk went over. It is the flat voice, and then the going quiet, and then the two days of the house walking carefully around him while he decides to be finished being hurt. Everybody in the house knows the weather map. The kids can read it from the driveway.

He has studied it for eleven years. That is not a figure of speech. There is a binder on the shelf above the desk with tabs in it. Dates. What set it off. What he had eaten, how much he had slept, whether it was a work week. He read the books. He listened to the series with the four sessions. He can tell you what happens in his chest ninety seconds before it arrives, and he can tell you the name for it in the clinical vocabulary and the name for it in the sermon vocabulary.

Eleven years of the finest research anybody has ever done on this subject, and every single page of it is about the weather and not one page is a request.

He looks at the counter. He looks at the spot he has wiped four times.

And you know what he is doing in that pause, because you have stood in a kitchen like it, or a truck cab, or the hallway outside a bedroom door with your hand on the frame. Somebody who loves you asked you a plain question about the thing in you, and the honest answer was not no, and it was not yes either, and the silence that followed was the most complicated thing in the house.

The question at the pool

There is a man at Bethesda who has been in that condition thirty eight years, and Jesus walks up and asks him something that sounds almost rude until a man has stood at his own counter with a dish towel hanging in the doorway behind him.

When Jesus saw him lie, and knew that he had been now a long time in that case, he saith unto him, Wilt thou be made whole?John 5:6

Thirty eight years. He asks anyway. And He does not ask for information, because the whole point of the sentence is that Jesus already knew how long it had been. He asks because wanting has to come out of the man's own mouth, and because a person can be near the water a long time without ever once saying the word.

You are being asked the same thing tonight, in your own kitchen, in the same voice that asked it at the pool. John 5 is written down for exactly this, and it is His Spirit who takes a line off a page and puts it into a room, so what stood in front of that man is standing in front of you now with the dish towel and the propped door and everything.

Notice what the question does to a man. It is not a rebuke. Nothing in that scene grades him for the thirty eight years, and nothing in it tells him how much of the delay was his fault. It hands him one thing to do that costs nothing and terrifies him anyway, which is to want it out loud.

His Spirit is the one who makes a wanting real rather than theatrical, and Scripture says God is at work in a believer both to will and to do. You have permission to want this openly, and the wanting is not presumption.

Studying it is not the same as bringing it

Here is where my own trade turns against me, and I am going to say it plainly because that is what I am for.

I can take a thing apart. I can name the mechanism, cite the source, mark where the sermon overstated it and where the clinician understated it. And I have caught myself treating a thing in me as a subject rather than as a request. A subject is safe. Nobody has to be told anything. A request means somebody now has the option of saying yes to me, and that is a different kind of exposure entirely.

Eleven years of notes on a thing is eleven years of holding it at arm's length in very good light.

You have already been given standing to ask, and it did not depend on how well you had prepared the file. Hebrews 4:16 is written as an invitation to come boldly, and His Spirit is the one who carries a man to the throne rather than his composure, so the asking does not wait on a better presentation of the problem.

And one plain paragraph, because in this category the thing lands on people who live in the house. If the pattern is frightening anyone, if there is contact, if the kids can read the weather from the driveway, then bringing in another adult is not a substitute for God working. It is one of the ways God does the work. A doctor, because a body has more to do with this than most believers will admit. A counselor, and a pastor who gets the whole of it rather than the edited version. Nobody should be managing harm alone in a house, and that includes the person causing it. And if your own nights have started telling you the family would do better without you, use 988 this evening, by phone or by message, or a crisis line local to you, and stay with somebody until morning.

You were never meant to carry the whole of this by yourself, and the help arriving is not a downgrade of what God is doing. Galatians 6:2 is written into the same book as everything else on this page, and the same Spirit who works in a man privately is the one who sends the people who sit across a table from him.

Wanting it is not the same as producing it

Now the part that gets confused, and it matters, because a tired man will hear the question at the pool as one more job.

The man at Bethesda did not heal himself by wanting it. He said yes, and Jesus did the rest, and the whole of his part fit in one sentence. Wanting is not the power. Wanting is the door being unlatched from the inside, and God does not come through a door He is not invited through, and He does not need it opened any wider than a man can manage tonight.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.Philippians 2:13

Read it slowly. Both to will and to do. Even the wanting is His work in a man, which means the yes you are afraid you cannot produce sincerely enough is already being produced in you by the Spirit while you stand there with the dish towel. You are wanting it right now, and that wanting is evidence of Him and not of your resolve.

I will not tell you how fast anything moves after a yes. Nobody on this site gets a schedule, and I would be lying if I handed you one. What I will tell you is where the beginning is, and it is not in the binder.

You have a God who begins, and He begins where He is asked. It is written in Philippians 1:6 that the One who began a good work is the One who carries it on, and His Spirit is the carrying, so the pressure to sustain it was never on the man who said yes in the kitchen.