The Arithmetic Nobody Else Is Doing

Saturday morning on a pitch at the edge of town, and the grass is white at the corners where the sun has not got round yet. Parents along the touchline in coats, hands in sleeves, a flask going round. Somebody's dog on a lead that keeps winding itself round somebody else's legs.

She is clapping. She means it. Her boy has just done the one good thing he will talk about all week and she saw it, and she shouted, and that was real.

And underneath the clapping, without her permission, her head is running the sum again.

The mother next to her has been talking about the trip at Easter, and where they will stop on the way, and whether the coach leaves early enough. The kit for it. The boots he has grown out of. What the club needs by the middle of next month. And while that conversation goes on over the top of her, quite kindly, with nobody being unkind at all, another conversation happens underneath in her own head, and it has been running since about the spring, and it is not about coaches.

It is this. She has never once, in her whole life, had a conversation about a trip without doing the arithmetic first. And the woman standing next to her, who is a nice woman, and who is not a better person than her, and who prays about as often as she does, has never done that arithmetic in her life. Not once. It has simply never been a thing she had to work out.

That is where the real question comes in, and it comes in sideways, the way the hard ones do. Not why am I short. She knows why she is short; she can list the reasons and most of them were not hers. The question is bigger and colder than that, and if you have ever asked it you will recognize it immediately.

Why them and not me.

And then, straight after it, the thing that frightens her more than the question does. She notices that she did not take it to God. She used to. Now it goes somewhere else in her, into a drawer at the back, where it sits with the other ones, going quietly hard.

Silt, and what it does to a channel

Here is what happens to water that stops moving.

A stream that runs keeps itself clean. Nothing settles, because nothing stands still long enough to settle. Block that stream, or slow it to almost nothing, and the same water begins to lay down silt, and the silt hardens, and after a season or two the thing in front of you is no longer a blocked channel. It is ground.

A question refused out loud does that. It does not evaporate. It settles, it hardens, and what began as a question turns into a floor underfoot, and nobody decided to build it and nobody remembers laying it down.

The Bible is not squeamish about this, which is one of the great mercies of the thing. There is a prophet who opens his book with a complaint so blunt that a modern person reading it for the first time usually checks whether it is really in there.

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not hear? Or cry to you "Violence!" and you will not save?Habakkuk 1:2

That is not a man losing his faith. That is a man taking the hardest thing he has straight up to God's face and saying it in the second person. He does not soften it, he does not add a disclaimer, and God does not strike him down or lecture him. What God does is answer him, and then, when the answer is even harder than the question, Habakkuk goes and stands at his watchpost and waits to hear what else will be said.

So hear this said over you, plainly. You are safe to ask. Not tolerated while you ask, not indulged. Safe. Scripture keeps a book of somebody doing exactly this, and it kept it on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who takes an old prophet's complaint and puts it into a woman's hands on a cold touchline.

Now let me be careful, because there are two cheap moves available here and I am not going to make either one.

The first is to tell you that you should not be comparing. You should. Anybody with eyes in their head would. The comparison is not a sin committed against that nice woman with the flask; it is arithmetic, and it is accurate, and pretending you cannot see it would not make you holier, only quieter.

The second is to explain it. To tell you the reason God has arranged things this way, what He is teaching you through it, or what is coming to you later that will make the sums come out. I do not know any of that, nobody has been authorized to tell you any of it, and a reason handed to you now by a stranger would be worth nothing on Tuesday.

What I have is smaller and it is actually true. You have somewhere to put the question that is not the drawer. And that changes what the question becomes. Asked out loud to God, it stays a question, and a question keeps water moving. Held in silence, it silts, and one morning you find you are not asking any more because you have already answered, and the answer you built without noticing is that He is good to other people.

That answer is not true, and you did not really reason your way to it, and the word does not put your lack down as a mark against you or as a report on how much you believe. His Spirit is not standing over your bank balance grading your faith, and He never has been.

So what do you do with a cold touchline and a question that has been going hard since the spring?

You say it. Out loud, to Him, in the second person, the way Habakkuk did. That is the appointed way and it always has been. Jesus put the measure of faith needed to speak so low that the men listening tried to argue Him upward, and the part He would not move on was that the mountain gets spoken to rather than carried around (Matthew 17:20). A silent question is a mountain. It has been in your chest for months and it has never once been addressed to the only person it is actually about.

And you have every right to speak to Him like that. Not because your week has gone well, but because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture gives you access to say the true thing rather than the tidy thing. His Spirit is what carries a spoken word out of a person on a touchline and into the ear of God.