The Question She Changes

It is not a difficult question and there is nothing sinister about anybody who asks it. It comes up perhaps three or four times a year, usually from somebody being kind.

She has an answer ready and it is a good one.

The answer is true, which is the part she is most careful about. It does not lie. It gives a real piece of information, and then it turns, and the turn is so smooth that in twenty two years nobody has ever felt it happen. People come away thinking they had a warm conversation, and they did.

Aisling is fifty. She has been doing this since she was twenty eight.

Here is what she noticed about a year ago and has not been able to unnotice. She has become extremely good at it. It is a skill now. She does it without preparing and without effort, in the way a person plays a piece they have played for decades, and the smoothness itself has started to bother her more than the thing it protects.

She is a woman of real faith and it is not decorative. She prays properly. She would say God has the whole of her.

Except one question, and the answer she has worn smooth.

If you have a place you turn a conversation away from, this is written for you. And before anything at all: nothing here will ask you to answer that question, to anybody, ever. Not to a person, not to a group, not to me. This is between you and God and it stays that way.

Twenty two verses, and then an imperative

Psalm 139 spends twenty two verses establishing one thing at enormous length: that God knows everything about a person already.

He knows the sitting down and the rising up. He understands the thought from a long way off. He knows the word before it is on the tongue, which is about as complete as a claim can get. There is no darkness that hides, no distance that removes, no wing of the morning fast enough. Twenty two verses.

And then David says this.

Search me, O God, and know my heart.

That is an imperative. He is asking for something. And the obvious question, the one nobody seems to ask out loud, is what exactly he is asking for, given that the preceding twenty two verses have made it impossible for there to be anything left to find.

There is only one thing an imperative can add to an accomplished fact. Not information. Permission.

He is not telling God something. He is saying: you may.

You are looking at an imperative that can only be adding permission, because everything else was finished twenty two verses earlier. Psalm 139:23 asks for a searching the psalm has already described as complete, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written asking and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands in an armchair.

And I want you to notice what that does to the terrifying part.

The terrifying part of any question is the moment of telling: the other person's face, the pause, the recalibration you can see happening. That is what a smooth answer has been protecting against for twenty two years, and it is worth protecting against, because faces do change and people do recalibrate.

There is no moment of telling here. That was finished before verse one. Nothing is being introduced.

You have nothing to introduce, and the absence of a moment of telling is the entire safety of this. It is written with the knowing complete before the asking begins, and His Spirit is the one carrying a completed knowing into a life, which is why it holds in a room where nothing has been said.

The one who asks

There is a second thing in that verse and I have come to think it is the kinder half.

In this psalm, the person doing the asking is the human being.

That is a reversal and it is worth sitting with for anybody who has spent decades being asked. In every scene she dreads, she is the one being questioned. Somebody else opens the topic, somebody else chooses the moment, and her whole skill is a defense built for a situation she does not control.

Here she is the one who speaks first. The imperative is hers. She sets the time, she opens the subject, and God is the one being addressed rather than the one asking.

That is a completely different position to be in, and it is the position the psalm puts a person in, and I do not think that is an accident.

You are the one holding the question here rather than the one being asked it. Scripture puts the imperative in the person's mouth and God on the receiving end of it, and the same Spirit at work in that psalm is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the turning has gotten heavier over the years, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past the ache and toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. And you do not have to answer that question to do that: a good one will never require it, and a woman can be well served for years without ever going near it. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. None of that is a failure of faith. God has always worked through people.

The skill is not the sin

Now I want to say something plainly about the smoothness, because I think that is where the real weight has settled.

The skill is not a sin.

A person who has built a true, kind, unnoticeable answer over two decades has not been deceiving anybody. Every one of those conversations was warm and every person came away having had a good exchange, and none of them was owed the other thing. There is no obligation anywhere in Scripture or in ordinary decency requiring a person to disclose what happened to them, and anybody who tells you otherwise has invented a rule.

What has gotten heavy is not dishonesty. It is competence. It is the discovery that you can now do it without thinking, and that a thing which started as a shield has become part of how you move, and that is genuinely uncomfortable to notice about yourself.

But being good at protecting a door is not the same as barricading it against God. Those are two entirely different activities and one of them has nothing to do with the other.

You have been protecting a door rather than barring one, and no amount of skill turns the first into the second. Psalm 139:23 has the asking come freely from the person after the knowing was already complete, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you that you answer that question this year, to anyone, including yourself. It may stay exactly where it is for the rest of your life and nothing about that would be a failure.

You are clean right now with the answer as smooth as it is, and the smoothness has never once been a witness about you. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.