The Question Was Never The Problem

The fourth floor is his at twenty to six. Nobody comes in on this side of the building before seven, so it is him, the trolley, and the noise the hoover makes every time it crosses the join in the carpet.

He knows these people by their desks. The one who leaves an orange on the monitor every night and has never once eaten it. The one with a postcard of a white church on a hill, pinned up so long the corners have gone soft. The one who keeps a spare pair of shoes under the drawers, heels together, like a soldier.

Tonight there is wrapping paper in the bin under the window desk. A card standing open beside the keyboard. Half a slab of something in a tin with a fork left in it. Somebody had a good day yesterday and the whole floor knew about it.

He ties the bag. He wipes the ring the tin left on the wood. He carries the fork down to the little kitchen at the end and runs it under the tap, because he always does, and because nobody has ever asked him to.

And on the walk back along the corridor the question arrives, whole, the way it does at this hour. Not shouting. That is the thing about it. It is a quiet, reasonable, well behaved question, and it has been the same one for four years.

Why them.

He does not say it. He has never said it. He is a decent man and he does not think it is a decent thing to say, so he folds it small and carries it back down the stairs with him, past the third floor, past the second, out through the loading door into the cold.

And you carry yours down your own stairs most mornings, or you would not have opened this.

The question is not the dangerous part

Let me say to you what nobody said to him on any of those stairs.

The question is not the problem. The question has never been the problem. What does the damage is a question that never gets asked, because a question you refuse to say out loud does not stay a question. It goes quiet, and quiet is not the same as gone. After four years of that it is not a question any more. It is a file. It is a case, assembled carefully by a man who would never in his life accuse God of anything, and every unfair morning goes into it, and he never reads it back because he does not want to know what is in there.

There is a man in Scripture who refused to do that. He walked up to God with it and put it down on the table. Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? That is Jeremiah 12:1, and you should read it slowly, because of the order of it. He tells God plainly that God is in the right. Then he asks Him why the wrong people are doing well. He does not soften it, he does not spiritualize it, and he does not apologize for asking.

You have permission on the page for the exact sentence you have been swallowing on the stairs, and it is not grudging permission either. The Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that a prophet's blunt question survived into the written word, unedited, so that a man with a bin bag in his hand at twenty to six could find it and know he is not the first.

Nobody had to protect God from Jeremiah. Nobody has to protect Him from you.

He is not running a queue

Underneath why-them there is usually a piece of arithmetic that has never been said out loud, and it goes like this. There is a set amount of God's kindness. Other people are ahead of me in the line for it. Every good thing that lands on somebody else's desk is one less thing that was going to reach mine.

That is the sum, and it is the reason the question feels dangerous, because if the sum is right then the good day on the window desk was taken out of your share, and loving your neighbor and trusting your God become two things pulling in opposite directions.

The sum is wrong. Not softened, not reframed. Wrong.

The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works. Psalm 145:9. There is no queue, there is no ration, there is no quantity of mercy being divided among applicants, and nothing that landed on their week was subtracted from yours. You are not standing behind anybody in a line for the goodness of God, and the same Spirit who wrote that line through David is holding it steady over you while your circumstances say otherwise.

Now hear what I am not doing. I am not going to explain to you why their year went like that and yours went like this. I do not know. Nobody writing anything anywhere knows, and a reason invented to make you feel better would be a lie told kindly, which is still a lie. The unfairness stays unexplained on this page. What does not stay is the sum underneath it.

Ask Him, do not file it

So here is the whole difference, and it is not a small one. A question addressed to God is prayer. A question held about God is a case.

The same words go in both directions. Why them. Said upward, in the second person, to His face, it is the oldest kind of honesty there is and it keeps you in the room with Him. Said inward, filed, carried down the stairs, it slowly hardens into a verdict about His character that you never consciously reached and cannot now put down.

I poured out my complaint before him; I shewed before him my trouble. Psalm 142:2. Look at what David does with the raw thing. He does not tidy it into a request first. He pours it, which is what a person does with something they are not going to be able to carry any further.

You have the standing to bring Him the question in the words that are actually in your mouth, not the ones you would use if somebody from church were listening. That standing is not a reward for having a good attitude about it. It is yours in Christ, and His Spirit is the one who carries a plain sentence out of a stairwell and makes it prayer rather than muttering.

And if the fear has been that asking would cost you your trust, it is the other way round. What costs you your trust is four years of not asking.