The Knock I Cannot Afford

Musa drives with the radio off now, which the regulars notice and nobody asks about.

He turns it off so he can hear the front offside. There is a knock in it that comes in on the turn and goes quiet on the straight, and he has known what it is since the winter, and he knows what putting it right involves, and that is the end of that conversation.

So he listens to it instead. Every turn, all night, the same small sound telling him the same thing.

Three in the morning on the rank by the station, third in the line, engine off and ticking as it cools. Nothing moving. A man in a high visibility coat sweeping the taxi bay with a machine that makes more noise than the whole street.

He has asked God about the car. He wants to be accurate about this, because accuracy is the only thing he has left in it. He has asked at the wheel. He has asked at his own kitchen table with the light off. He has asked on his knees on a Sunday in a church where the pastor prayed over him twice by name.

Nothing came back. Not a no. Not anything.

And this is the part he has never told anybody, because saying it out loud makes it sound worse than living it. Somewhere in the last year he started answering for God. He would ask, the silence would sit there, and rather than leave it sitting he would fill it in himself. Perhaps there is something in me that has to go first. Perhaps this is the kind of thing where you have to stop wanting it. Perhaps I am the sort of person who gets the long version.

He supplies the reply. And every reply he supplies has a verdict on him buried somewhere in it.

Tonight he does not do it. He sits with his hands on the bottom of the wheel and he says it out loud in an empty car on an empty rank.

I asked You about this car. You did not answer that.

And then he does not start the engine, and he does not go home, and he does not fill the gap in with anything. He just stays where he is.

The Answer You Keep Supplying On His Behalf

I want to start with what is actually happening, and not with what you think is happening.

You think the problem is the silence. The problem underneath the silence is that the silence has not been left silent. Every unanswered prayer has been getting a reply written into it in your own handwriting, and then read back as though it arrived from somewhere else.

Notice what your version always contains. There is always a reason in it, and the reason is always about you. Something unconfessed. Something not surrendered. Something not yet learned. Nobody who fills in God's silence ever fills it in with kindness, and the accumulation of that, night after night for years, is the weight on your chest at three in the morning.

So let me put in your hands a thing God did with somebody else's silence.

There is a psalm in the Bible that never comes right. It is number eighty-eight and it is the darkest thing in the book. It has a music director's instruction at the top of it, which means it was written to be sung by a congregation, in public, out loud, by people who were not currently in trouble.

"But I, O Lord, cry to you; in the morning my prayer comes before you. O Lord, why do you cast my soul away? Why do you hide your face from me?"Psalm 88:13 and 14

And here is how it ends. Not near the end. The last line.

"You have caused my beloved and my friend to shun me; my companions have become darkness."Psalm 88:18

That is it. That is where the song stops. No turn, no yet, no sudden morning, no closing verse where the singer works out what God was doing all along. The Holy Spirit saw that song into the book and left it exactly like that.

Now take this where you are sitting. You are not holding an unresolved prayer that God is embarrassed to be associated with. You are standing in a place He has already published, because Psalm 88 is in Scripture with no answer in it and no verdict written underneath it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that a song with no ending stayed in the book so that you would have somewhere to stand tonight.

Notice what God did not add at the bottom of it. No note explaining the man's error. No footnote about what the silence was for. He let a song about unanswered prayer stand in His own book without one word of correction attached to the person singing it.

I Am Not Going To Explain This To You

Now I have to tell you what this article will not do, and I would rather disappoint you here than sell you something in the last paragraph.

I am not going to explain the silence. I am not going to tell you it is a delay, or a test, or a door closing so a better one can open, or God building something in you, or a lesson with your name on it. I do not know. Nobody writing to you knows. And the moment I hand you a reason, I have handed you back exactly what you keep handing yourself: a story neither of us can verify, which holds for a fortnight and then collapses and takes more of your trust with it.

Three men in the Bible did exactly what I have just refused to do. Job's friends sat with him seven days in silence, which was the best thing they ever did, and then they opened their mouths and explained his suffering to him. Chapter after chapter of reasons, all theologically tidy, every one of them landing on Job.

And at the end of the book God speaks, and what He says about their explanations is that they had not spoken rightly of Him (Job 42:7).

You are free of the reasons. Every explanation for this silence that has been handed to you, or that you have written yourself in the dark and signed His name to, has no standing over you, and Scripture makes that plain in the one place where God Himself reviews the explainers, and the Holy Spirit is the one loosening their grip on you as you read this.

Nearness Is Not A Payment Anybody Earned

There is a second thing underneath, and it is quieter than the first.

Somewhere in these years you started treating His nearness as something with a price on it. Not deliberately. The silence turned up, you took it for distance, you took the distance for something you had failed to pay, and you began trying to earn back a nearness that was never being sold.

"If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you."Psalm 139:11 and 12

You are in a place that is not dark to Him. That is not my reassurance, it is Psalm 139:12 in the written word, and His Spirit is in the car and in the room and in the small hours whether or not anything in you can currently detect Him.

And hear the whole of that, because half of it is worse than none. His nearness being real does not mean the prayer was answered. It was not. This page is not going to quietly swap one for the other and then congratulate you on having received something. He is here, and it was not answered, and those two things are standing side by side and neither one cancels the other.