Why Do You Ask My Name

The notebook has been on the desk since October and there are thirty-one attempts in it.

He started it after a conversation at work, where a colleague had said something offhand about religion being a way of not thinking, and he had gone home irritated and decided he would write out, properly, in one paragraph, exactly what he means by God.

Not for the colleague. For himself. He is that sort of man.

The first attempt was two sentences and he crossed it out the same evening.

By November they were getting longer. By January he had started numbering them. There is one, attempt nineteen, that ran to most of a page and that he still thinks is quite good, and there is a line under it in different ink, added weeks later, that says: this is a description of a very large man.

That is the trouble, and it has taken him eleven months to see the shape of it.

Every version he finishes reads as though he has caught something. And the moment a version feels finished, he knows he has got the wrong thing, because whatever he has managed to close his hands around is by definition the sort of thing that can be closed around.

He is not in crisis. He goes on Sunday. He prays. None of that has wobbled.

But there is a notebook on his desk with thirty-one crossings out in it, and last Tuesday he sat down to write attempt thirty-two and did not, and instead sat there for about twenty minutes with the pen in his hand, and something in that felt more honest than any of the thirty-one.

He was asked directly and He answered with a question

Let me put a marker down first, because a careful man will otherwise hear the whole article through the wrong ear.

The notebook is not vanity and it is not unbelief. It came out of wanting to be able to say something true when somebody was careless about it, and that is a good instinct, and thirty-one attempts is not a symptom of anything except taking the subject seriously. Nobody here is telling you to think less.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: what you noticed in the different ink is correct, and it is not a defeat. You have not been failing for eleven months. That is not my kind reading of a notebook, it is what stands written in Judges, where a man asks the messenger of the Lord directly for a name and gets a question back instead of an answer, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved that exchange was in your study last Tuesday with the pen in your hand.

Read what happens, because it is one of the strangest small scenes in the Bible.

Then Manoah inquired of the angel of the Lord, What is your name, so that we may honor you when your word comes true? He replied, Why do you ask my name? It is beyond understanding.Judges 13:17-18

Manoah's motive is impeccable. He wants the name so he can give honor properly. He is not testing anybody.

And the answer is: why do you ask. It is beyond understanding.

That is not a refusal to help. It is help. He is being told the truth about the category he is standing in, and Manoah goes on to worship anyway, and he does it without ever getting the word he asked for.

So this is yours right now rather than pending attempt thirty-two: the failure of every version is not a defect in your thinking, it is accurate reporting from the edge of the category. The written word has God answering the direct question with a question, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been telling you the same thing in different ink for eleven months.

Now let me say the thing your instinct already knows and has not been allowed to state.

A definition works by fixing limits. That is what the word means. And you have been applying an instrument whose whole function is to establish boundaries to the one subject that has none, and then treating the failure of the instrument as a failure of the operator. Nothing written asks that of you, and the Holy Spirit has been telling you so in the margin for eleven months.

Attempt nineteen was good, and your note underneath it was better. A description of a very large man is what you get when the method succeeds, and the success is the problem.

And here is the guard, because a man like you can take this in a direction that would cost you.

None of this is an argument for stopping thinking, and none of it makes the notebook a mistake. The reason you can tell that attempt nineteen was a description of a very large man is that eleven months of exact work sharpened you enough to see it. A vague man would still be pleased with attempt three. What is written is that we love God with the mind as well as everything else, and the Holy Spirit has been using the notebook the whole time, just not for what you opened it for.