Eleven Months Of Asking For One Word

He asks for one word. That is all. Not a plan, not a sign in the sky, not a voice out of a cloud. One word, yes or no, about one decision.

He has been asking since last September.

Every morning, before the house wakes, he stands at the kitchen window with the shutters half open and puts the same question up. Some mornings he phrases it carefully, as if the wording were the problem. Some mornings he just says the name of the thing and waits.

And then he makes breakfast, because nothing comes.

The strange part, he would tell you, is not the waiting. It is what the waiting has done to his ear. He has started second guessing every ordinary thought he has, in case that was it and he missed it. He replays conversations looking for a coded message. A man who once heard God simply and gladly now stands in his own kitchen suspicious of his own mind.

If you have been standing at a window for the better part of a year, come and stand at mine. I have no explanation for you and I will not manufacture one.

I will not tell you why it is quiet

Let me clear the table before we eat, because a braced man tastes nothing and the title will have braced you.

I do not know why God has not answered. Neither does anyone who tells you they do, and I have met plenty of them.

I am not going to suggest you have sin in the way. I am not going to say He is testing your patience, or refining you, or protecting you from an answer you would hate, or waiting for you to be ready, or speaking in a way too quiet for your unspiritual ear. Every one of those hands the silence back to you dressed as insight, and it does real damage in a kitchen at six in the morning.

You are not under a verdict. Eleven months of quiet is not God turning His face, and it never was. I am not offering you my opinion here. The written word says the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy (Psalm 103:8), and it says it about His nature and not about our streak of good weeks, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a man standing at a shutter with a cold cup in his hand.

Scripture keeps a man who stood and waited

There was a prophet who put his complaint up and then did something I find astonishing. He announced that he was going to go and wait for the answer where it could be seen coming.

I will stand upon my watch, and set me upon the tower, and will watch to see what he will say unto me, and what I shall answer when I am reproved.Habakkuk 2:1

He climbed up. He waited. He said out loud that he was waiting, and the book kept it. Nobody edited the waiting out to get to the good part faster, and the waiting is a chapter of Scripture in its own right.

You have not fallen out of the company of God's people by being on a watchtower for eleven months. Standing there is a posture the Word honors by name, and you are keeping a watch, not failing an exam. That is written down and left there deliberately, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a man who has begun to think of himself as somebody God stopped talking to.

The ear was never the instrument

Here is the part that eleven months does to a person, and it is worth naming plainly, because it is quieter than doubt and more corrosive.

You start auditing yourself. Was that Him. Was that just me. Should I have noticed something. And under all of it sits the suspicion that if you were closer to Him you would have heard by now.

Put that suspicion down. It is not made of Scripture, and the Holy Spirit did not put it there.

You are not waiting because you listen badly. Hearing was never a skill you had to be good enough at, and He is not withholding Himself from a man with an imperfect ear. The Word says the Lord will guide thee continually (Isaiah 58:11), which is a sentence about His steady habit and not about your receiving equipment, and it is the Holy Spirit, and He is the one who does the guiding, which means the responsibility for getting it across never sat on your side of the window.

And if the eleven months has worn you thinner than you are telling anyone, if you are not sleeping, if the mornings frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.