The Question You Stopped Asking

There was a question Fiona used to ask, and she was known for it, and then one year she was not known for it any more.

It was a simple question. It was not a clever one, and it was never a trap. She would ask it in the middle of things, without any edge, in the way that people who genuinely want to know ask things, and it had a habit of stopping a conversation and turning it slightly, and quite often the turn was the useful bit.

She has not asked it in about three years.

She realized on a walk, of all places, out on the hill in a wind, when a friend said something offhand about how Fiona always used to ask that, and laughed, and moved on to something else.

Fiona did not move on. She walked another mile and a half without hearing much of anything.

Because it was true, and once it was said out loud she could see the shape of the whole thing, and the shape was this: she had not stopped asking because she stopped wondering. She stopped asking because at some point she worked out, without ever putting it into words, that an honest answer would have made staying where she was difficult.

Not impossible. Difficult. That is the whole size of it.

And here I want to slow down, because this is a tender place and I am not going to hurry through it.

There is nothing dishonourable about staying somewhere. Faithfulness is not cowardice. A great many people stay in things for years, patiently, at cost, and that is not weakness, it is often the most Christlike thing in their lives, and I am not going to stand here and imply otherwise to anybody.

That is not what happened to Fiona and it is probably not what has happened to you.

What happened is smaller and quieter. She did not decide to stay and she did not decide to stop asking. She simply noticed, somewhere below language, that the two things did not fit comfortably together, and one of them went, and it was not the staying.

That is the sale. There was no buyer. There was no moment. There is only a woman on a hill in a wind, three years later, realizing that a question she used to be known for has not come out of her mouth since a spring she cannot date.

You have your own. There is something you used to ask, out loud, easily, of yourself or of somebody else or of God, and you do not ask it now, and if you sit still for a second you can hear it. It has not gone anywhere. It has been waiting.

Nobody is calling you a compromiser. Not one word of this is an accusation.

But a question was retired, and what it bought was the ability to stay somewhere without discomfort.

Truth is described as a thing you buy, and then never sell

There is a line in the Proverbs that treats truth like property, and the second half of it is the part that matters here.

Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.Proverbs 23:23

Sell it not. Which tells you plainly that selling it is possible, and that it is a thing people do, and that the writer had seen it happen often enough to warn about it in a single clause without needing to explain what he meant.

He does not say people renounce the truth. He says they sell it, which is a transaction, which means there is always something received in exchange, and it is rarely money, and it is very often peace and quiet.

And hear what is already true over you as you sit there. You are held while you ask. That is not my sentiment: the written word says nothing can separate you from the love of God in Christ, not height, not depth, and certainly not a question, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that settle in a woman who has been walking a mile and a half in silence.

And the Spirit is not frightened of the question. The word calls Him the Spirit of truth and says He guides into all truth, so He is not standing at the edge of your honesty hoping you will not go any further in. He is the one who has been holding the question open for three years, which is why a friend's offhand remark on a hillside could find it still intact.

What is not being asked of you

I want to be very careful in this paragraph, because a message like this can hand a person a bill they will still be paying long after the writer has gone to bed.

Nobody here is telling you to leave anything. Not a place, not a role, not an arrangement, not a house. I do not know your circumstances, I do not know who depends on you, and I am not going to pretend from this distance that I can see what you should do, because I cannot, and the honest thing is to say so.

Asking a question is not the same as acting on an answer. You are allowed to do the first without committing to the second. That is not cowardice and it is not delay. It is how discernment has always worked: a thing gets looked at before it gets decided, and God is not in a hurry.

And I am not naming your situation either, because I do not know it, and a message that guesses at somebody's life and then preaches at the guess does damage.

So hear what is not required. You do not owe anybody a decision tonight. Nothing in Scripture makes God's nearness conditional on your having resolved something, and the Spirit of God has never once withdrawn from a person who was still working out what was true.

And three quiet years have cost you nothing with Him. He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, says the written word, and He was on that hill in the wind long before your friend said anything.