The Question I Never Asked

Gerald has been at that Tuesday table for twenty-two years and has one question he has never asked.

He could tell you the exact week it arrived. He was forty-one. It arrived while he was doing something completely unrelated, and it has been with him ever since, and in twenty-two years he has never once said it out loud in a room with another person in it.

That does not mean he has ignored it. Gerald is not a man who ignores things. He has read four books that circle it. He has typed it into a search bar, at night, more than once, and cleared the history afterward, not because there was anything to hide but because seeing it there in his own handwriting felt like something.

He has an answer, more or less. He has assembled one privately over two decades, and it is a decent answer, and it holds most weeks.

What he has never had is somebody else in the room while he says the question.

The group is a good group. That has to be said plainly, because it would be easy to blame them and there is nothing to blame. Seven or eight men, mugs, a plate of biscuits, a lamp, twenty-two years of Tuesdays. They have buried two of their own out of that room. Gerald would say, without hesitating, that they are the best friends he has.

He simply understood, early on and without anybody saying it, that a man who has been coming for twenty-two years is one of the ones who answers.

Then in the February a new lad started. Nineteen. Barely says anything, sits at the end, drinks about four cups of tea.

Second week, right in the middle of something else entirely, he said, "Can I just ask something?"

And he asked it.

Gerald's question. Not a version of it. The thing itself, badly phrased, in about eleven words, with no scaffolding and no apology.

And the room did not fall in.

Somebody said, "That is a good question." Somebody else said, "I have wondered that." One of them said something not very helpful. Another said he had thought about it for years and still did not know, and said it cheerfully, and reached for a biscuit.

It took about nine minutes and then the conversation moved on and somebody put the kettle back on.

Gerald sat in his car afterward for a long time.

Twenty-two years. Nine minutes.

Now let me ask you.

What have you looked up privately and never once said out loud?

The man who said the honest thing to His face

There is a scene in Mark where a father brings his son to Jesus and it is not going well, and he says something that has kept a great many people in the faith.

Immediately the boy's father cried out and said, "I do believe; help my unbelief."Mark 9:24

Look at what he actually says, because it is not a tidy sentence and nobody has ever improved it.

I do believe. True. He is standing there, he has brought the boy, he has come all that way.

Help my unbelief. Also true, and said in the same breath, and to the face of the person He is asking.

He does not resolve it before speaking. He does not go away, work it out, and come back with a settled position. He says both halves at once because both halves are what is in him, and he says them out loud in front of a crowd and the disciples and Jesus.

And Jesus does not turn him away. There is no rebuke, no probation, no come back when you have sorted yourself out. He acts.

So hear this over you, in the car outside with the engine off. You are not disqualified by a question, and the honesty is not a threat to your standing with Him. That is written down in a Gospel, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches the depths of God and gives understanding, which He has never once withheld from somebody for asking badly.

Now let me name what has actually kept you quiet for twenty-two years, because it was not fear of the answer.

It was your position in the room.

Somewhere along the way you became one of the ones who answers. Nobody appointed you and nobody would confirm it if you asked, and you would be genuinely surprised to hear how little the others think about the hierarchy you have been living inside.

But it is there in you, and it made an unasked question compound. Year one it would have been ordinary. Year six it would have been surprising. By year twenty-two it feels like it would be an event, and the longer that goes on the more it feels like the question has grown, when in fact all that has grown is the silence around it.

That nineteen year old asked it in eleven words in his second week, and the reason it cost him nothing is not that he is braver than you. It is that he had no position to protect.

You are permitted to have no position to protect either. The written word says God is our refuge and strength, a very present help, and it does not add a clause about people who have been coming a long time. His Spirit is the one who holds a person while they say something they have never said.

Let me be careful about one thing.

This is not a message about doubting well, and it is not about becoming the person in a room who asks difficult things as a habit. That has its own vanity in it.

It is about one question, asked once, out loud, in a room with somebody in it. That is the whole of the ask.

And you are not the only thing holding that group together, so nothing about it falls over when one of the ones who answers turns out to be a man with a question.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote that he had been assailed by questions harder than anything his opponents ever brought him, and that he had learned to speak them out rather than hold them, because a question held in silence becomes a monster and a question said in company usually turns out to be a question.