Ask Your Father And He Will Tell You

She has read about four hundred thousand words on this and she has never asked a person.

That is not an exaggeration for effect. She has done the reading. She has the tabs. She can tell you what six different people think about the thing she is stuck on and she can tell you which two of them she finds most convincing.

And she is still stuck, in exactly the same place she was stuck eighteen months ago.

Because the thing she is actually stuck on is not an information problem. It never was.

It is a how do you keep going when it goes quiet problem, and there is no article about that which will do anything for her, and she has read all of them anyway, because reading is what she does instead of being in a room with somebody.

She is twenty-six. She is genuinely bright. And there is a man in her family, still alive, in a chair, four miles away, who has been doing this since 1961 and who has been through two of the exact things she is currently stuck on and has never once been asked about any of it.

She has read four hundred thousand words. She has not driven four miles.

So let me ask you.

Who is still alive that you could just ask?

The method named in the song is asking

At the very end of Deuteronomy there is a song, and near the start of it there is an instruction about how to find something out, and it is not the method any of us reach for.

Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you.Deuteronomy 32:7

Ask your father. Ask your elders.

That is the research method. A named person, a question, and an answer that comes out of a mouth.

Deuteronomy 32 names asking a living person as the route to the thing rather than any private study, and the Spirit who gave that song put the elders in the sentence as the source, so the answer you have been looking for in four hundred thousand words has never once been kept where you have been looking.

Okay, real talk, because you and I are the same in this and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Looking it up feels like doing something. It feels responsible. It feels a great deal safer than sitting on a carpet in front of somebody and admitting you are stuck.

And it is safer. That is the honest reason. A book cannot look at you.

But eighteen months in the same place is not research any more, it is an avoidance with excellent footnotes.

Deuteronomy 32 pairs remembering the days of old with a question put to an actual elder, and the Spirit joined those two things in one verse, which means the thing you are missing was never going to arrive in a tab and has been sitting in a chair four miles away.

And here is the bit that should get you moving, because it is nearly funny.

The verse assumes they will tell you. He will tell you. They will explain to you. There is no anxiety in it about whether they will want to.

Deuteronomy 32 treats the willingness of the older ones as a given rather than as a risk, and the Spirit put that confidence in the line, so the awkwardness you are dreading has never once been in the instruction.