Forty Years Of Asking

Ruth Ann was twenty-four when a woman she respected told her to ask, and she has asked ever since, and she is sixty-four.

She wants to be clear, if anybody asked her, that she is not complaining. She was told a true thing by a good woman and she has done what she was told and there is no grievance in it.

But something has happened to the asking over forty years, and she noticed it about eighteen months ago and has not been able to stop noticing it since.

It has become work.

It has a form now. She does it at a particular time. There is a way she words it that she has arrived at over decades, and she has caught herself, more than once, going back and doing it again because she thinks she said it wrong. Not wrong theologically. Wrong in some other way she could not explain to anybody. Insufficiently. With the wrong amount of something in it.

She has caught herself checking her own sincerity as she goes, the way you might check your grip on a rope, and finding it wanting, and starting again.

Forty years of asking for a gift, and somewhere along the line she started earning it and did not notice the change of currency.

She would never put it like that. She would say she is being faithful. And she is being faithful. It is just that faithfulness and labor got tangled up somewhere in about 1996 and she has been paying in ever since.

She sat on the porch about eighteen months ago and heard herself, out loud, say: I am doing this right, am I not.

To nobody. To the beans.

You might know that porch.

Maybe your forty years is four, or fourteen. Maybe you have a form of words too. Maybe you have gone back and asked again because something about the first one did not feel like it counted.

Paul asks one question and does not answer it

There is a place in Galatians where Paul is exasperated in the way only somebody who loves people can be, and he asks a question, and he does not soften it.

This only would I learn of you, Received ye the Spirit by the works of the law, or by the hearing of faith?Galatians 3:2

He does not answer it. He leaves it standing there, because he knows they know, and because a question a person answers themselves goes in deeper than a statement.

So let it stand for you too, and answer it about your own forty years.

Not: is asking wrong. Asking is not wrong and Jesus told people to. The question is narrower and more uncomfortable. Somewhere in those forty years, did the asking stop being the hearing of faith and start being works?

And you know the answer, because you heard yourself say it to a bowl of beans.

And you did not receive Him by works and you are not keeping Him by works either. The written word puts the question in a form that answers itself, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has been checking her own grip like a rope.

And you are not required to word it correctly. The word says likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and it says the Spirit Himself makes intercession, and the Spirit is the one doing that rather than grading your phrasing.

Nobody is telling you to stop asking

Now I want to be plain, because plain is all I have got and because a person could take this the wrong way in about nine seconds.

I am not telling you to stop.

Jesus told people to ask for exactly this and He attached a how much more to it, and I am not going to take that off you or make you feel foolish for forty years of taking Him at His word. If you ask tomorrow morning at the same time in the same words, that is a fine thing to do and I would not change it.

What I am asking is that you take the invoice off it.

Because there are two different things that can look identical from the outside. A woman asking her Father for something because He said to. And a woman submitting a form, correctly completed, for the eleven thousandth time, and going back over it in case of an error.

Same words. Entirely different transaction.

And He is not a Father who withholds pending a correctly completed request. The word says if ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him, and the Spirit is the one who makes that how much more land rather than reading as a technicality.

And the wind was never yours to bring

There is one more thing and I think it is the one that actually loosens it.

You have been asking for forty years for something you have been assuming is not here.

Jesus describes the Spirit as wind, and the entire point of the description is that it comes and goes without consulting anybody and cannot be dated or accounted for. Thou canst not tell whence it cometh.

Which means, and I want you to sit with this, that forty years of not being able to point at an arrival is exactly what He said it would be like. It is not the absence of the thing. It is the description of the thing.

And He may well have been in this house the whole time. The word makes the wind precisely the thing nobody can account for, and the Spirit is the one who lets a woman hold that as possibility rather than as consolation.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh, and it is written to people who were doing exactly what you have been doing, and the Spirit is the one who ends an audit that was never opened by Him.