Three Dry Holes

Roberta has been hauling water for three years and she has stopped talking about it.

The well started dropping in the spring of the first year. Not dramatically. Just enough that by August you had to be careful about the washing, and by the second summer it was gone by four in the afternoon most days.

They have had two dowsers out. One of them was very confident and charged accordingly. They have had a proper contractor with a rig, twice, and there are three holes on that property now and every one of them is dry, and the last one they drilled to a depth that made the man himself go quiet.

So she hauls. Two runs a day in the good months and four in August, in the back of a truck that is older than her youngest, and she has a system now and she has strong arms and she does not complain about it, and if you saw her at church you would not know.

What she has stopped doing is talking about it.

Because of what people say.

They are good people. That has to be said and it has to be said first. They mean every word and most of them have offered practical help and about six of them have actually turned up with jugs.

But there is a sentence. And it comes at her about twice a month, at a supper or in a doorway, from somebody kind, and it goes:

"Well, the Lord has got a plan in it."

And another one goes, "He must be doing something in you through this."

And another, "There is a reason, honey. You will see."

And Roberta says something like "Mm" and moves the conversation, and goes home and unloads the truck.

Dessa said it in the June and then saw her face.

Dessa is sixty and has known her since they were girls and is not a woman who blunders past a thing. She stopped, right in the middle of the sentence, and said, "That was not helpful, was it."

And Roberta said, and it took everything she had, "Do not. Please."

And Dessa said, "All right."

And then Dessa did the thing that changed the summer. She did not explain herself, and she did not defend the sentence, and she did not go and find a better one. She sat down on the step and stayed there until it got dark and they talked about somebody's daughter's wedding.

Now let me ask you what yours is.

The scan that came back the same. The application, again. The child, still. The letter you have read four times because it says what the last three said.

And the sentences people hand you.

Job says the plain thing and it is in the Bible

There is a passage in Job that gets left out of most of the comfort people offer, and it should not be, because it is the most honest description of this condition that exists.

Behold, I go forward but He is not there, and backward, but I cannot perceive Him; when He acts on the left, I cannot behold Him; He turns to the right, I cannot see Him.Job 23:8 to 9

Four directions. Forward, back, left, right. A man turning all the way around and finding nothing in any of them.

And Scripture puts that in a book and does not correct it. Job is not rebuked for that sentence. At the end of the whole thing, God turns to Job's friends, the ones who kept explaining, and says that they have not spoken rightly about Him, and that Job has.

Read that again if you need to. The one who said I cannot find Him anywhere is the one God said had spoken rightly. The ones who kept producing reasons are the ones He did not commend.

So hear this said over you, on the porch with the truck still half loaded. You are not failing at faith by finding nothing in any direction, and the friends with the sentences are not more spiritual than you. That is written into the ending of Job, and it is the Holy Spirit who is with a person in the exact season when nothing about Him can be perceived, which is a claim about Him and not a claim about how well you are managing.

Now let me be careful about the people who say the sentences, because I am not going to hand you a grievance.

They are not wrong that God is sovereign. They are not wrong that He works. Scripture says both.

What they are doing is saying a true thing at a moment when it functions as a door being closed. It arrives as an explanation for something that has not been explained to anybody, and it puts a person in the position of having to look grateful for a reason nobody has actually been given.

And this article is not going to do that to you either.

I do not know why the well is dry. I do not know what the third year is for. Nothing here is going to suggest that God arranged the drought to work something in you, or that there is a lesson you are being slow to learn, or that it would have broken by now if you had prayed differently.

What I will say is the one thing this whole site is built on, and it is smaller than an explanation and it holds more weight.

Hidden is not absent.

There is a place in history where God did the most He has ever done and every single visible sign said He was not there: no answer, no rescue, the sky wrong, a man dying. That was not God being away. That was God at work in the only place He could do it, and He did it in the dark where nobody could see Him doing it.

Which means the fact that you cannot perceive Him is not information about whether He is there. That is written, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person standing through three years of the same answer, and the standing itself is the evidence, because nobody stands that long on their own.

Look at what you have done. Three years, two runs a day, four in August. You have not left. You have hauled water and gone to church and been kind to people who said the wrong thing to your face.

That is not the behavior of a woman God has left. That is the behavior of a woman being carried by somebody nobody can see.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote that God hides His work under its opposite, and that the person who insists on finding Him only where He can be clearly seen will miss Him entirely. He called the other way of looking the theology of the cross, and he said it was the only kind worth having, because it is the only kind that survives a bad year.