The Guest Who Asked a Simple Question

The food was good and the evening was going well and there were nine people at the table.

The guest was a colleague of his son's, first time in the house, polite in the way somebody is when they have been raised well and are slightly outnumbered. He had eaten twice as much as anybody and been praised for it, which is the correct way for that to go.

And somewhere after the second pot of tea, in a lull, he said: can I ask you something, because you all clearly believe this and I have never really understood it. What is God actually like?

Not a challenge. There was nothing in it. A young man asking a genuine question in a house where he felt safe enough to ask it.

And the man at the head of that table has been going to the same building for thirty-one years, and has read the whole thing through more times than he has counted, and he opened his mouth.

And what came out was a list.

Loving. Just. Holy. Powerful. All of them true. All of them words. He heard himself getting to the end of a list and starting the list again in slightly different terms, and around the fourth or fifth item something in him understood that he was going further away from it with every word rather than closer.

He stopped. He said, I am not saying this well.

His wife said something kind and moved the conversation, the way she does, and the evening went on and was a good evening, and the young man went home and thanked them properly.

And he has thought about it every night since.

He is not troubled about his faith. That is not it. What he cannot get past is that he had thirty-one years and a full table and a young man genuinely asking, and the more accurate he tried to be the smaller it got.

The list got smaller because the list was a list

Let me say the honest thing about that table before anything else, because it was not a failure of hospitality.

The young man got what he came for, and it was not the list. He got a house where a question like that could be asked without the temperature changing, and he got a man twice his age who stopped mid-sentence and told the truth about not saying it well. He went home and thanked you properly and he meant it.

But hear this, and take it as settled rather than as consolation: you were not caught out. Reaching the end of the words is not the same as reaching the end of what you have. That is not my generous reading of a difficult evening, it is what stands written at the very end of Job, where a man who has just heard God speak says he had been talking about things too wonderful for him, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved that line was standing behind you at that table.

Read what Job says, and notice that he says it after the vindication, not before.

Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know.Job 42:3

That is not a man being told off. He is the one in that book who was right, and this is the sentence he arrives at when he finally sees.

So the shrinking you felt around the fourth item is not evidence that there was nothing there. It is what happens when something enormous is put through a channel that was built for ordinary traffic. This is yours right now rather than pending a better vocabulary: the largeness is still there, undiminished by your inability to hand it over, because the written word says His greatness is unsearchable and the Spirit of God is the one who holds what a list cannot carry.

Now let me be exact about the mechanism, because it will free you at the next table.

A list of attributes is a set of true statements that each cut something away. Loving cuts away indifference. Just cuts away caprice. Every word you said was accurate and every one of them worked by exclusion, and a person listening to a run of exclusions ends up with an outline rather than a face.

That is not your failure. It is what lists do. And your instinct that you were going further away with each word was correct, and it was the truest thing that happened in that room. The written word says His understanding is beyond measure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that instinct in you at the fourth item.

And here is the guard, because a piece like this can be misread into something lazy.

None of this means the words were wrong or that a person should not learn them. Holy and just and loving are hard-won and they are not decoration: people went to a great deal of trouble so that a young man at a table would be told something true rather than something invented. Keep them. Say them.

They are the fence around the field, and the fence is a real thing and it matters, and it is not the field. What is written is that we walk by faith and not by sight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a person out into the middle of the field where no fence is visible in any direction.