Every Answer, and Still Not Moved

She had done the course. Twelve weeks, two evenings a week, in a room above a bank with unreliable heating, and she had done every piece of the reading.

By the end of it she could handle the objections. The usual ones and several unusual ones. She had the manuscript question at her fingertips. She could explain, kindly and without raising her voice, why suffering does not settle the matter the way people assume it does, and she had a careful, generous answer for the one about the other religions, and she had never once used any of it to win, because she was not that sort of person.

And she had not moved.

That was the part she never said out loud in the room above the bank. Twelve weeks. A folder with tabs in it. An A grade, if the course had given grades. And inside her, the same flat quiet she had carried up the stairs on the first evening.

Then in December her nephew's school held its carol service, and she went because her sister asked her to.

Thirty-one children, most of them under nine. A piano a little out of tune. A boy in the second row singing every word half a beat behind everybody else and entirely without embarrassment. A girl at the end not really singing at all, just mouthing it. By any standard she owned, the whole thing was badly done.

And on the third verse of the second carol, something went through her chest like a door opening in a wall she had not known contained a door, and she had to look very hard at the fire exit sign so her sister would not see her face.

In the car park afterwards she was almost angry.

Because she had spent twelve weeks getting the evidence right, and what had actually reached her was thirty-one children singing out of tune about a baby.

The second door was never the soft one

Let me start where you would not expect me to start, which is on the side of the twelve weeks.

That work was good work. It was honest and it cost you evenings, and the people who gave their lives to it did something careful and unglamorous so that faith could be spoken about without embarrassment. Nothing in the next thousand words is a swipe at them. If you love the reasons, love them. Keep the folder.

But hear this, and hear it as something already settled rather than as encouragement: you are not a failed student of God. You have not been sitting at the back of a class you cannot pass. That is not my read on your temperament, it is what stands written, because the Psalm does not say study and understand, it says taste and see, and the Holy Spirit has been drawing you toward the tasting the whole time you were waiting for the argument to do it.

Look at how that line is built. It is an imperative handed to somebody who has not yet done it. It assumes a sense, not a syllabus.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him.Psalm 34:8

Taste is not a lower faculty than thought. It is a different one, and it is the one that reports back with your whole body. You have that faculty. You have been using it every day of your life on ordinary things and discounting it on the one thing it was made for, and the written word never once asked you to switch it off, and His Spirit is the one who put the ache in you when those children started singing.

Here is what happened in that hall, said plainly. Beauty got past the checkpoint.

Argument arrives at the front, where you are standing with your folder, and you meet it as an equal, and you weigh it. Beauty comes in at the side, in a school hall, on the third verse, while you are not braced. It is not sneaking. It is simply not addressed to the part of you that was on duty.

And this is yours, right now, not later and not once you have decided whether it counts: the moment in that hall was real. It was not a mood swing and it was not sentiment leaking. Scripture puts the beauty of God at the center of what a hunted man asked for, one thing, to gaze, and the same Spirit who moved on the face of the waters is not embarrassed to move on a girl mouthing the words at the end of a row.

You are allowed to come in by that door. Not instead of thinking. Alongside it, and today, and without a permission slip from anybody who happened to come in by the other one.