The Morning the Arguing Stopped

There had been an argument running in his head for about nine years.

Not with anybody in particular. It had started with a real conversation, years back, with a man who had been kind about it, and it had simply never ended. He carried it into the shower and into the car and into the last twenty minutes before sleep. He would win a round of it while cleaning his teeth and lose the same round on the drive to work.

His wife had stopped asking what he was thinking about, because the answer was always some version of the same thing and neither of them enjoyed it.

Then in March his brother had a boat and no crew and needed a hand, and he went, mostly to be a good brother.

They were out before it was properly light. And there was a stretch, maybe forty minutes, before the wind got up, where the water was completely flat.

Not calm. Flat. Like something that had been poured and left to set. The color of it kept changing as the sky did, and it made almost no sound at all, and his brother was doing something with a rope at the other end of the boat and said nothing for the whole forty minutes.

And somewhere in there the argument stopped.

Not resolved. Not answered. It simply was not running, for the first time since he could remember, and he sat there with a hand on the gunwale and a piece of his own mind back that he had not known was gone.

Back at the dock his brother asked if he had enjoyed it, and he said it was good, thanks.

Because what was he going to say. The water was flat and my head went quiet. Nine years and it took forty minutes of a boat. He could not make it sound like anything. He has not told anybody, and it is now nearly two years, and he still thinks about that stretch of water more often than he thinks about anything else that happened that year.

Something taught you out there and it did not use a sentence

Before anything else, let me say a word for the nine years.

The argument was not a waste and it was not a sickness. A person who keeps turning a hard question over is a person taking God seriously enough to want it to be true, and there is more honesty in that than in a lot of easy agreement. If you have been told that your questioning is the problem, you were told wrong, and you were not told it here.

But hear this, and hear it as a finished thing rather than as a consolation: you were taught something out on that water. You are not a man who had a nice morning and made too much of it. That is not my read on your temperament, it is what stands written in the oldest book in the Bible, where a man in the middle of the worst argument in Scripture is told to go and ask the animals and the birds and the fish, and the same Holy Spirit who breathed that page is the one who held forty minutes flat for you in March.

Look at how Job's friend puts it, because the instruction is stranger than people notice.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you; or speak to the earth, and it will teach you, or let the fish in the sea inform you. Which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this?Job 12:7-9

They will teach you. That is a teaching verb, used about creatures that cannot form a sentence.

So there is a whole faculty of instruction that does not run through language, and it is not the beginner's version. It is put into the mouth of a man arguing with God about suffering, at the highest level that argument has ever been conducted.

And this is yours right now, without you first working out how to describe it: what happened on the water was a lesson. The word says the earth teaches and the fish inform, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a lesson land in a man who is not taking notes.

Here is the thing you have got backwards, and I want to name it gently because it has cost you two years.

You have been assuming that if you cannot say it, you did not get it. Every school you ever attended trained you that way, because a school has to test, and the only thing a school can test is what you can put into words.

God has never been under that constraint. Scripture is full of people who were changed at a place and could only afterwards pile up some stones and give the place a name, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for your report before He counts it as delivered.

You have got the thing. You just cannot examine on it.