By Whom, And To What End

There is a car parked across the road from a building that used to belong to Alistair's family, and he has been sitting in it for about forty minutes.

He is not doing anything dramatic. He has a cup of tea from the garage and the window is down an inch and he is looking at a door he used to have a key for. Eighteen months. That is how long it took for all of it to go, and here is the part he cannot get anybody to sit still for: nobody did anything wrong.

Not him. Not his brother. Not the two people who worked for them for eleven years and had to be told on a Friday. There was no fraud, no betrayal, no gambling, no secret. Three things happened in the wider world that nobody in that building had any say over, and they happened in the wrong order, and the whole thing came apart like a wall in rain.

He has been given a great many explanations since. That is what he wants to talk about, actually, more than the money.

Someone told him God was pruning him. Someone told him it would make sense in five years. Someone said the words everything happens for a reason to him in a car park and he had to walk away mid-sentence. A kind man from his church told him God had needed him free for something else, and Alistair went home and could not pray for eleven days, because if that was true then God had done a considerable amount of damage to two families he loved in order to arrange his diary.

Here is what he actually wants, and nobody has offered it to him.

He does not want the reason. He has stopped asking for the reason. What he wants to know is whether anyone is holding the wheel.

Because if this was governed, he would like to know by whom, and to what end. And if it was not governed, he would rather be told that plainly than handed a small tidy meaning to hold, because a small tidy meaning is worse than nothing at all when you have watched it happen.

You know this from wherever your own eighteen months came from. You do not need it explained. You need to know who is at the wheel.

Two piles, and only one of them is yours

There is a sentence near the end of Deuteronomy that has held people upright for three thousand years, and it does it by dividing everything into two piles.

The hidden things belong to the LORD our God, but the revealed things belong to us and to our children forever, to do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

Read what it does not do. It does not say there is no reason. It does not say the reason will be given to you later, and it does not say that if you were more spiritual you would have been told. It says the hidden things belong to Somebody.

That word is doing an enormous amount of work. A hidden thing that belongs to God is not a gap. It is not an absence, not a hole in the world where an explanation should have been. It is His property. It is in His keeping, held, accounted for, known, and not lost.

And then the second half hands you something, and I want you to notice how much smaller it is than what you have been demanding, and how much heavier it is than what you have been offered.

The revealed things belong to us. Those are yours. Not the reason. The revealed things: who He is, what He has said, what He has done, what He has told you to do next. That pile is yours to live on, and it is enough to stand on, and it is the only pile anybody has ever actually stood on.

Now here is what that gives Alistair, sitting in his car.

It gives him a governed universe without a supplied explanation, and those two things are not opposites. Everybody who came to him with a reason was trying to be kind. They could not bear for him to be in an ungoverned world, so they filled the silence with an explanation, and the explanation was not theirs to give, and it did him harm.

I am not going to do that to you. I do not know why the eighteen months happened. Nobody writing on the internet knows why your eighteen months happened, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing with your life and calling it faith.

What I can tell you is that the hidden things are not unheld. There is a difference between nobody knows and you have not been told, and the whole weight of your life can rest on that difference.

This tradition was built by people who worked that out under real pressure. They held that God governed whether or not the powers of their day agreed, and they held it in seasons when nothing around them looked governed at all, and they never once claimed to know what He was doing. That is the shape of it. He reigns; He has not explained; both are true at once and the second does not weaken the first.

So you may stop trying to construct a meaning that will make it bearable. You were never asked to. You have been carrying two jobs and only one of them is yours.

So hear this said over you, eighteen months in with a question nobody has answered. You are not failing to work something out, because the thing you have been reaching for was never on your side of the line, and everything you actually need to stand on was handed to you and to your children permanently. That is written into a verse that draws the line in God own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who helps in our weakness because we do not know how to pray as we should.