When I Understand What Happened

Her father was fifty eight and he had been the healthiest man in three streets, and it took nine days from the first proper symptom.

At the funeral she read a passage and she read it well, and afterward, in the parking lot with her shoes in her hand because the grass had finished them, she told God that she would keep coming. That whatever else this did to her, she was not going to be one of the people who drifts off after a death. She said it half as a promise and half as a warning to herself.

She lasted about eight months.

And the way it ended is worth saying because it was not dramatic. She did not lose her faith in an argument. She simply found, one Sunday in the autumn, that she could not sit in a building and sing sentences about goodness while that question was sitting unanswered in her chest, and she went home at the second hymn, and then she did not go the next week, and after about a month the not going had become a settled fact.

Four years.

And this is her condition, which she has stated to precisely nobody: she will come back when she understands what happened. Not when she feels better. Not when she has forgiven anybody. When it makes sense. Because to walk back in without understanding would be, in her own private judgment, a kind of surrender of her mind, and she is not going to buy peace by agreeing not to think.

You may have set that one. You may have decided that the honest thing is to stay outside until it adds up, and you may have been outside for years, and the arithmetic may not have moved an inch in all that time.

Two categories of thing

I want to hand you a sentence from Deuteronomy that has been more use to me than almost anything else in Scripture, and it is not a comforting sentence. It is a dividing one, which is better.

Moses has been laying out a great deal of hard material about what happens to a people and why. And in the middle of it, without any fanfare, he draws a line down the middle of reality.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

You are standing at the edge of a pile that was never issued to anybody on this side of it. Deuteronomy 29:29 divides the secret things from the revealed ones and gives us only the second, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has stayed with you in the not knowing.

Two piles, and only one of them is addressed to you

There are secret things. That is not a euphemism for things God is hiding out of unkindness. It is a plain statement that there is a category of matter which is His, and which has not been given out, and which nobody standing on this side of it has been issued.

And there are revealed things. And those, the verse says, belong to us. Not to the clever ones. Not to the ones who have come to terms with it. To us and to our children for ever.

Now look at what you have done with your four years. You have been standing at the edge of the first pile, waiting to be handed something out of it, and refusing to touch the second pile until you are.

You are waiting on a category of information that has never been issued to anybody standing where you are standing. Deuteronomy 29:29 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a long hard speech and stands it beside a woman with her shoes in her hand.

And I want to be careful, because you are exactly the sort of person who is patronized by preachers, and I am not going to do it.

Your refusal to buy peace by agreeing not to think is a virtue. I mean that. It is the reason you are still turning it over four years later rather than settling into a comfortable numbness, and it is the reason you would smell any answer I gave you that was not true.

But there is a difference between not agreeing to stop thinking and requiring an explanation as the price of entry. The first one is integrity. The second one is a condition, and you wrote it, and it has kept you outside a door that was never guarded by an examination.

You have set an entry requirement that Scripture never sets and that nothing in the revealed pile supports. That is what it means that the secret things belong to Him, and the Spirit of God has been with you in the not knowing for four years without once asking you to pretend.

Nothing goes back on

And now, precisely, because this is where preachers do damage.

I am not taking understanding off you and handing you a smaller version. I am not going to say that you do not need to understand but you do need to accept it, or make peace with it, or stop asking. That is the same door with a worse sign on it, and it would ask you to do something to your own mind that God has not asked.

The condition comes off. Nothing goes on.

You may walk back in with the question exactly as unanswered as it was in the autumn four years ago. You may sit in a room and sing nothing and think your own thoughts. You may go on asking for as long as you like, and asking is not a bar to entry, and there is a whole book in the middle of the Bible where a man asks for thirty eight chapters and is not thrown out.

You stand inside on His terms tonight, and His terms have already been met by Him and never included an explanation. That is the plain sense of the two categories in Deuteronomy 29, and His Spirit has been holding that true for you the whole time.