The text comes at ten past nine, or it does not come at all.
He has the phone face up on the arm of the chair where he can see it, and he is not looking at it, and he could tell you to the inch where it is. Tomorrow's start time, or nothing. It depends on the rain that has been coming across the fields toward the village since four this afternoon.
Three weeks in the fruit. Then a fortnight of nothing, because it did not stop. Then eight days. Then a Sunday with the sun out and no work anyway, because by then the gang had moved on to another farm.
He does not complain about the weather. Complaining about weather is for people whose week does not depend on it. For him it is simply the thing that decides.
He asked God about this in the spring. Not vaguely, and not in church language. He stood at the end of a row at the very start of the season, on a morning when the whole of it was still in front of him, and he said the entire thing out loud, plainly, the way you would say it to a man standing next to you at a gate.
That was the spring. It is nearly the end of the season now, and what has come back is silence. Not a no. A no would be something. Silence.
And here is the part he has not said to anybody, not once, not to his wife and not to the man he shares the lift with. He does not mind the rain. He minds that he has started wondering what the quiet means about him.
They stopped him halfway down a row this afternoon. Rain coming, everybody off. He walked back up past all the fruit he had not picked, and the row lay behind him half done, exactly as he left it.
That is the picture, then. A row he did not finish, a question he never got answered, and a man walking back up the middle of the two of them.
You know that walk. So sit down here with me for a while, because I am not going to explain your silence to you, and I am not going to leave you standing in it on your own either.
I am not going to explain this to you
Let me get the worst habit in the room out of the room first.
When somebody says the need was real and the answer did not come, they usually get handed a reason inside about a minute. There is something in your life that has never been dealt with. God is teaching you patience. It is not the right time. You did not really believe.
I am not doing that, and I want you to hear why rather than just take my word for it. Not one of those four sentences comes from God. Every one of them is a person who cannot bear an open silence closing it with the nearest available lid, and the lid always ends up sitting on top of you.
So the honest position first. I do not know why nothing came. Nobody writing anything anywhere knows that, and a person who tells you they do is selling you a lid. You are not being punished for something and you are not being processed through a syllabus, and the reason I can say that flatly is that Scripture never once hands the man who wrote Psalm 88 a reason, and the Holy Spirit who breathed that psalm into the book (2 Timothy 3:16) plainly did not think an explanation had to come before comfort could start.
The song God left unresolved
You may not know this psalm. Most people do not, because it never gets read out anywhere.
Lord, why castest thou off my soul? why hidest thou thy face from me?Psalm 88:14
That is the middle of it. Here is how it ends, and I want you to sit with the fact that this is the last line:
Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into darkness.Psalm 88:18
That is it. That is the whole ending. Every other psalm of that kind turns somewhere near the end, and you can feel the turn coming as you read: but I will trust, but Thou hast been my help, yet will I praise Him. This one does not turn. It asks why God has hidden His face, it gets no reply inside its own pages, and it stops in the dark.
And now notice what that psalm actually is. It is not a diary entry somebody found in a drawer. It has a musical instruction at the top of it. It was a hymn. It was handed to a choirmaster, set to a tune, and sung out loud by a congregation of God's own people, and God kept it in the book.
You are holding something enormous there and I want you to hold it slowly. God did not edit the unanswered prayer out of His own songbook. He did not attach a note to it explaining the delay, and He did not append a happy verse so that nobody would be uncomfortable. The written word left the question standing, and the same Spirit who kept it standing is with you in the chair while your phone stays dark.
So whatever else is true tonight, this is settled: saying it did not come is not unbelief. It is scriptural. There is a tune for it.
Near is not a payment you failed to make
Now the second thing, and I am going to be careful with it, because this is exactly the place where somebody usually tries to sell you the silence back as the answer.
I am not doing that either. His nearness is not your answer wearing a different coat. The thing you asked for in the spring is still the thing you asked for, and it is still not there, and nothing I say next cancels that or is meant to.
But two things can stand up in the same evening.
If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee.Psalm 139:11 and 12
Read what that does and does not claim. It does not say the dark lifts. It says the dark is not dark to Him, which is a completely different sentence and a far better one, because it means His nearness never depended on your ability to see it.
Job said he went forward and God was not there, and backward and could not perceive Him (Job 23:8), and Job was not corrected for saying it, and he was not abandoned while he said it either. You are not disqualified. Nothing in the whole of creation is able to separate you from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus (Romans 8:38 and 39), and the Holy Spirit is in the room praying through you with groanings that will not go into words on the nights you have run out of your own (Romans 8:26).
Hear the shape of that. His nearness is not a payment you missed. It is not a wage for good waiting and it was never withheld pending better behavior. You have it now, in the chair, in the quiet, with nothing answered.
Here is what changes tonight, and I want to be exact about it, because I am not going to hand you a small thing dressed up as a big one.
The answer does not arrive at the end of this article. What arrives is this: you can say the true sentence in front of God, out loud, without one thing going wrong.
That sounds modest until you have tried it. Most of us have quietly believed that naming the silence would offend Him, or would count against us, or would be the moment we finally stopped being one of the faithful ones. So we go around it. We say we are trusting when what we are actually doing is not looking.
But the man who wrote Psalm 88 said it straight to God's face and stayed in the choir. You are on that ground too, and it is yours in Christ rather than earned by good behavior: come boldly to the throne of grace (Hebrews 4:16), which is a strange phrase until you notice it was written to people in trouble, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns your plain sentence into prayer rather than complaint.
Nothing is being redefined here. It was not answered. You are saying so, in His presence, and you are staying.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud where you are sitting. The right to speak like this is yours in Christ and it is not issued on the strength of what came or did not come. Scripture is the ground under every word of it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely brave. What God does about the need is His, however He answers, and nothing on this page pretends to know.
- Question I asked in the spring, you are still standing unanswered and I am not pretending otherwise. Psalm 88 stops in the dark and God kept it in His own songbook without one word of explanation attached to it, and He never called the man who sang it faithless. In the name of Jesus I say you plainly, and I stay exactly where I am.
- Idea that I have been quietly disqualified, you are dismissed and you do not get to sit in this row with me. Scripture says nothing in the whole of creation separates me from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is carrying my praying on the nights I have no words left to carry it with. His nearness was never a payment I failed to make.
- Lord, You are here in a row I did not finish, and Psalm 139 says the darkness and the light are both alike to You. I thank You, because You have not gone anywhere, and Your Spirit is in this chair with me while not one thing is settled. It was not answered, and I am staying.
Psalm 88:14
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