It Does Not Help Me

Shai can defend God better than anybody you know and he has not prayed in five years.

Nobody has noticed. That is not carelessness on anybody's part. He is in the room every week and he leads a study and people come to him with the hard things and he is patient and thorough and he never once talks down to them.

Five years ago something happened. I am not going to describe it and it is not the same as yours.

And what Shai did with it is what Shai does with everything: he went and built the account.

Properly. He read the serious material and then the material it was arguing with. He can lay out four different treatments of the problem and give you the strongest form of each, including the ones he does not hold. He can steelman the position of a man who walked away, so well that the man would recognize himself in it.

He is genuinely good at this. It is not a pose and he has helped real people.

He has not said one sentence to God since it happened.

Not a decision. He would tell you honestly that he never sat down and stopped. He simply moved, over about eleven months, from a life that had prayer in it to a life that had an account in it, and the second one has been so absorbing and so useful to other people that nobody has ever asked.

There was an evening in the spring.

Somebody came to him after a hard thing in their own family, and asked him the question, and Shai did the whole thing. Carefully, and without condescension, and taking their situation seriously rather than handing them a lecture.

And it landed. They said so, and they meant it.

They said, "Thank you. That really helps."

And Shai drove home and got about two miles and thought, quite clearly:

It does not help me.

He pulled over.

And what he understood, sitting there with the engine running, is what the account has actually been for.

It was never to understand. He knew, at some level, from about the third month, that he was not going to understand.

It was so that he would not have to feel it.

An explanation is a place to stand. And a place to stand is not the same thing as a person to stand with, and for five years he has been standing on a very well-built floor entirely on his own.

Now let me ask you who yours has been helping.

Because if this is yours you have an account, and it may well be a good one, and other people are the better for it, and the honest answer to that question will take you about four seconds.

The line, and what is on your side of it

Moses says something near the end of Deuteronomy that is one of the most practically useful sentences in the Bible, and it is usually quoted as half of itself.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

That verse draws a line and puts things on both sides of it.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God. Not: the secret things do not exist. Not: you have failed to work them out. They exist, and they are His, and they are described as belonging to Him in the same way a possession belongs to somebody. They are not withheld out of unkindness. They are simply not yours.

And then the second half, which is the one that gets left off.

The things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever. There is a whole side of that line that is yours. Given, permanently, to you and to your children, and the verse says what it is for: so that you can actually live.

That is an allocation, not a rebuke. Moses is not telling anybody to stop thinking, and this is a book absolutely full of reasoning and argument and instruction. He is telling them where the material runs out and what they have been given instead.

So hear this said over you, pulled over on a road with the engine running. You have not failed to work something out, because the thing you have been trying to reach was never on your side of the line, and everything you actually need to live on was handed to you long ago. That is written into a verse that draws the line in God's own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who helps in our weakness because we do not know how to pray as we should, and He is the provision for exactly a man who has run out of sentences.

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to tell you the thinking was wrong.

It was not. Some of what you built is true. This site belongs to a tradition that has never once been embarrassed about hard thinking, and it trained its ministers in three languages and argued in public for four hundred years, and the reason it did that is that it thought people deserved better than sentiment.

And the people you have helped were genuinely helped, and that is not a consolation prize.

What went wrong is not the account. It is the job you gave it.

You made it load-bearing. It stopped being a way of thinking about God and became the thing you stand on instead of Him, and the reason that happened is not intellectual pride, whatever you have been telling yourself at three in the morning.

It is that an explanation is safe.

You can hold an argument. It does not move and it does not go quiet on you and it never once fails to answer when you go to it. A person can, and five years ago one did, and a man who has been through that will build a floor rather than knock on that door again, and he will do it without ever making a decision.

That is not a sin. It is a fracture, and it needs the thing a fracture needs, which is not more analysis.

The word says the secret things belong to the Lord, and Job's whole book ends with God speaking for four chapters and never answering the question. And the Spirit of God is the one who intercedes for the saints with groanings too deep for words, which is God's own provision for a man with nothing formulated, and it means the first prayer back does not have to be any good.