The Question I Could Not Answer

It was two years ago in a car and she still thinks about it about once a week.

Her friend asked her something. Not aggressively, not as a trap, and that is what makes it so hard to put down. It was a real question from somebody in real pain, about why any of it works the way it does, and it had her whole life in it.

And she did not know what to say.

She said something. That is the worst part. She said a thing she had heard somebody say once, and she heard herself saying it, and she watched it land in the passenger seat like a wet leaflet, and her friend was very kind about it and changed the subject.

Two years.

And what has happened in those two years is not that she has looked up the answer, though she has tried twice and it did not stick. What has happened is quieter and much worse.

She has stopped opening her mouth.

Not deliberately. Nobody decided anything. But there is a thing that happens now in conversations, a small internal step back at the exact moment where she used to step forward, and it happens by itself, and its reasoning is always the same.

You do not actually know enough for this.

She has been walking with God for eleven years. She has more of Him in her than half the people who could have answered that question fluently.

And she has been quiet for two.

So let me ask you.

What question shut your mouth, and how long ago was it?

He was cross examined by professionals and he did not budge

There is a man in John's Gospel who is born blind and gets healed on a Sabbath, which turns the whole thing into an incident, and he ends up in front of a panel of people who know infinitely more religious law than he does.

They question him. Then they question his parents, who are frightened and put it back on him. Then they question him again, at length, and they are not being gentle.

And they hand him a theological proposition to agree with. They say: give glory to God, we know this man is a sinner.

Now watch what he does, because it is one of the great answers in the Bible and it is not clever at all.

He replied, Whether He is a sinner or not, I do not know. One thing I do know. I was blind but now I see!John 9:25

He concedes the whole field in the first half of that sentence. You have permission to do the same, and the Spirit has never made the ability to answer everything the price of saying the one thing you actually know.

He concedes the whole field. I do not know. He does not bluff, he does not reach for something he heard somebody say once, he does not pretend to a competence he has not got.

And then he plants his feet on the one square meter of ground he is actually standing on, and no amount of expertise can move him off it, because it is the one thing in the room that is not a matter of opinion.

I was blind. Now I see.

Now hear what that does to two years of silence.

You are not unqualified to speak. Scripture puts the strongest answer in that whole chapter in the mouth of the least educated man in the room, and the Holy Spirit poured out on all people never once required a person to be able to answer everything before He would use what they actually know.

And here is the thing that went wrong in the car, and it was not what you think.

You did not fail because you lacked an answer. You failed, if we are calling it that, because you reached for one you did not have. The wet leaflet was not your poverty; it was your borrowing. And the mercy in this is that the man in John 9 shows you the exact alternative, and it costs nothing, and you could have used it that day.

I do not know. Then the thing you do know.

That is a complete answer. It is not a lesser one. In front of professionals, on the record, it was the one that held.

The fire this house is named for fell in a room in Los Angeles in 1906 where almost nobody could have won an argument with a seminary. What came out of that room was not a rebuttal. It was a testimony, which is a completely different kind of sentence, and it is the kind that cannot be refuted because it is not making a claim about anybody but the person saying it.

And you are not disqualified by a silence in a car. John 9 says the man told a panel of professionals what he did not know and then held the one thing he did, and the Holy Spirit has never required somebody to know everything before He would use what they have.