The Search History At One In The Morning

You typed it in the dark with the brightness turned right down.

Not because anybody would have seen. You live alone and there was nobody in the house. You turned it down out of a reflex that goes deeper than privacy, which is that some questions feel like they should be asked in low light.

You typed the actual question. Not the polite version. The one that has been sitting under everything for about four years, phrased exactly as it sits in you, with no theological furniture around it.

And then you read for about an hour and a half and none of it helped, and at ten past three you put the phone face down and lay there.

And the thing you have carried since is not the question.

It is that you asked it.

Somewhere in you there is a filing system, and that night went into a folder marked evidence, and the folder is about you rather than about God. It says: a person who has to type that at one in the morning is not a person in good standing.

Before we go one word further, hear me.

I am not correcting you.

You did not do a wrong thing at one in the morning. There is no rule anywhere that you broke and I am not going to treat the question as a symptom. It is a good question, actually, and the fact that nothing you read answered it is a fact about the internet rather than about you.

I am saying I know what is in the folder. That is all.

Upbraideth not

Here is a verse people quote for the first half and never finish.

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him.James 1:5

And upbraideth not.

Upbraid is an old word and it means to reproach somebody, to bring up their failing in the middle of helping them. It is what a person does when they hand something over and make a small remark about the fact that it was needed.

James puts that in specifically. He is not describing what God gives. He is describing His manner while giving it, and he takes the trouble to rule out the exact thing that frightens you.

God does not sigh when the question arrives. He does not say, again? He does not preface the answer with an observation about how long the asking has gone on.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, in your kitchen with the light coming up.

You are asking of a God who does not upbraid. Not one day, not once the question resolves, not when you have earned a cleaner search history. Right now, at first light with the toast on, you are one of the any of you in that verse, and the manner is written into the sentence. That is not my reassurance. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real person at a real hour of the morning.

Now, the plain thing, and I am not going to hedge it.

Your doubt is not why.

Not why the thing has not moved. Not why the situation is what it is. Not why the four years have gone the way they have gone.

I want to say that without any qualification attached, because versions of it with qualifications attached have already been said to you, and the qualifications are where the damage lives. Nobody in Scripture is told that their questions voided their standing. The disciples asked constantly. Job asked at length and God answered him at even greater length and never once said the asking was the problem.

That is not sin and it is not a leak in your faith. It is what a mind does when it takes something seriously.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You have a standing that a search history at one in the morning cannot touch. The word says God giveth to all men liberally, and liberally is a word about how much rather than about who qualifies, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real kitchen at first light.

The folder marked evidence has nothing in it. It never had anything in it. It has been costing you four years of storage for an empty file.