Eleven Years Of How Are You

Somebody asked her properly in March and she could not do it, and that is how she found out.

She was in a kitchen at somebody else's house, and it was a woman she does not know well, a friend of a friend, entirely outside all of it. And this woman put a cup down in front of her and sat down opposite and said, so how are you doing with all of it, and then did the thing.

She waited.

That is all. She did not fill the pause. She did not add a second question to make it easier. She sat there with her hands round her own cup and let about four seconds go by, and looked at her, and waited.

And she found that she could not answer.

Not would not. Could not. Something in her had gone rusty in a way she had never noticed, because the machinery had not been asked to move in a very long time. She got about four words out, generic ones, and then heard herself and stopped, and then said something about the drive, and the woman let her, kindly, and the moment went past.

She thought about it all the way home and has thought about it since.

Because here is what she worked out. She is asked how she is perhaps twenty times a Sunday. Twenty times. That is over a thousand a year, and eleven years of that, and she has answered every single one of them correctly and warmly, and not one of them was a question.

They are greetings. That is all they were ever meant to be, and there is nothing wrong with any of them, and she would be appalled if anybody in that building read this and felt bad. How are you is what a warm person says to somebody they are glad to see, and every one of those twenty was warmth.

But she has been receiving warmth in the shape of a question for eleven years, and answering it, and something in her had begun to file that as being asked.

And in a stranger's kitchen in March she found out what the difference feels like, and could not do it, and has been quietly unsettled ever since.

He does the searching first

I want to start this by telling you what this message is, and I will keep the promise all the way through.

Nothing is going to be asked of you here. There is no point at the end where I turn round and hand you something. You are not being equipped tonight and there is nothing for you to do afterwards, and if you get to the last line and find that something was smuggled in, then I have failed and you may ignore it. You are being sat down.

Now, the psalm.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.Psalm 139:1-2

Look at the first verb, because it is doing something almost nobody notices.

Thou hast searched me. Searched is an investigation word. It is used of miners digging into rock and of people going through a house looking for something. It is active, effortful and deliberate. It is not a word about noticing somebody in passing.

Which means the knowing in that psalm did not happen because the man explained himself. It happened because God went and looked.

Hear that in a kitchen with a cup in your hand. You are known without having answered. That is not my comfort; it is what the verb in that verse actually means, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes an old digging word and makes it land in a woman who could not get four sentences out in March.

And look at what He is said to know. Downsitting and uprising. That is a Hebrew way of saying the whole of it: two ends of the ordinary day, and everything between them assumed. Not the crisis. Not the highlights. The sitting down and the getting up, which is the part of your life nobody has ever asked about because it does not look like anything.

The thought afar off, too. Understood before it arrives, from a distance, without being spoken.

So the machinery that has gone rusty in you was never the thing that was carrying the knowing. You have not become unknown by being unable to answer. Scripture puts the searching entirely on God's side of the exchange, and the Holy Spirit has been doing that work in you across eleven years of greetings that were only ever greetings.

Let me say one more thing about March, because you have been treating it as a symptom and it is not.

You could not answer because nothing had asked that part of you to move in a long time. That is not damage and it is not a defect of character. It is a completely ordinary thing that happens to a capacity that has not been used, and it says nothing whatever about whether the capacity is still there.

The woman in that kitchen did something rare and good, and it exposed something true, and you have been reading the exposure as a diagnosis. It was not one. It was four seconds of somebody waiting, and a person finding out what they have not had.

You are searched and known tonight. His word says so in the past perfect, as something already completed, and the Holy Spirit does not need a good answer from you in order to keep hold of the whole of it.