The Last Question I Asked

She was on the phone to her sister on a Tuesday and something odd happened.

She got off the call, put the phone face down on the counter, and stood there. Nineteen minutes. Her sister had rung about a hospital appointment and somewhere in the middle of it there had been a small disagreement about their father, and she had settled it. Properly. With dates.

And standing at the counter afterward she tried to remember the last question she had asked anybody. Not a question like where are you, or did you eat. A real one, where she did not know the answer and wanted it.

She could not find one. Not that week. She went back further and it got worse, because she started remembering conversations and could hear, in every single one of them, her own voice arriving at the point.

She is not unkind. Everybody would tell you she is generous, that she turns up, that she has driven people to appointments at six in the morning for years.

She just wins every phone call, and she had never once put those two things in the same thought until Tuesday.

If you have stood at a counter after a call and felt something you could not name, you know what I mean. And I am not going to tell you what it means about you. I am going to tell you what it costs.

The point is not the problem. The arriving is.

Let me describe something, and you can decide for yourself how much of it belongs to you. I do not know your family and I am not going to pretend I do.

Arriving at the point is a skill. It is genuinely useful. In a crisis you want the person who can get there, and people have been glad of that in you for years, and they are right to be.

What a skill cannot do is decide when to be off. It has no sense of occasion. So it turns up in the crisis and it also turns up on a Tuesday when your sister is frightened about an appointment and is talking about your father because she does not know how to talk about the appointment.

Nobody chooses that. It is a reflex with excellent aim.

Now read the psalm that has the most confident person in the Old Testament doing the exact opposite, and notice who is asked to do the searching.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.Psalm 139:23

David is not a man short of certainty. He has killed a giant and written most of the songbook and he is entirely capable of settling a matter with dates. And here he opens himself to an examination he does not control and cannot win.

You are safe to be examined, and the safety is already established rather than something you have to secure by getting there first. That is not a rebuke. It is written in Psalm 139:23, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

Notice what the psalm assumes. Being searched by God is not dangerous to a person He loves. That is why David can ask for it. And a person who can be searched by God can survive being asked a question by their sister.

So the arriving has not been strength. You have a standing that no phone call can move, and it is yours already before anybody says a word. The word settled that before Tuesday, and the same Spirit who inspired it is at the counter while you read this.

What happens to the other end of the line

Here is the cost, and it lands in a place you would not expect.

The people you settle things for do get the settlement. That is real. Your sister now has the correct dates about your father and she did not have them before.

What she does not have is the thing she called for.

She rang because she is frightened, and a frightened person talks about the wrong subject on purpose, and waits to see whether there is room. If a point arrives, the room closes, politely, and the conversation goes on being useful and stops being what it was for.

And it costs you too, and this is the part worth sitting with. You have not been asked a real question in a long time either. The traffic goes one way on a road like that. You have made yourself into somebody people come to for answers, which is a good thing to be, and there is nobody left who brings you a question that has no answer in it.

You have permission to not know something out loud, and the permission was given rather than earned by finally being right about everything. Psalm 139 has the king asking God to search him; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to say I do not know and mean it.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you have to be the one with the answer is that somebody near you punishes you when you are not, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.