I Do Not Know What It Is

Something is wrong and he cannot tell you what it is.

That is the honest position and it has been the honest position for about two years, and it is why he has never said anything to anybody.

It is not guilt about a specific act. He has gone looking for one, several times, in the way you go through a house looking for a smell. He has examined the obvious candidates and none of them is it, and he is not the kind of man who invents a fault to have something to hold.

It is not sadness either, exactly. He functions. He is good company. He was genuinely happy at his nephew's wedding in the spring.

There is simply something that is not right, somewhere underneath, that has been there long enough now to have become part of the furniture, and he cannot get a name on it.

And here is the rule he has been living under, which he has never once said out loud.

You cannot bring a thing to God until you can say what it is.

So he waits to be able to name it, and he has waited two years, and in the meantime the whole matter sits outside the conversation entirely, because it does not have a label he can put on the front of a sentence.

So let me ask you.

What would you say if you had to say it, and do you actually know?

The psalm ends by asking Him to do the looking

There is a psalm that spends most of its length on how completely God knows a man, and then it ends in a way that surprises people who have been paying attention.

He has just spent twenty-two verses establishing that God knows when he sits and when he rises, and his words before he speaks them, and the dark is not dark to Him.

And then he finishes with a request.

Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.Psalm 139:23 and 24

See if there is any.

Psalm 139 ends with a man asking God to do the finding rather than presenting Him with a list, and the Spirit who searches everything was already doing that searching, so having no name for it has never once kept anybody out of the conversation. You are already in the conversation.

Read the shape of it, because it is the opposite of what most of us do.

He does not say: here is what is wrong with me, deal with it. He says: You look. He is asking for a search precisely because he does not have the inventory himself, and he has just spent the whole psalm saying that God does.

That is a man bringing an unnamed thing.

Now let me be careful, in the way we are careful here.

I am not going to tell you what is wrong with you. I do not know, and nobody writing anything could, and the man who tells you he can name your unnamed thing from a distance is guessing at a stranger.

And I am not going to tell you who to say anything to. Nothing here requires a person or a place or any arrangement, in any direction.

What I am telling you is that your rule is not in the text.

Psalm 139 puts the request for a search at the end of the longest description of God's knowing in the book, and the Spirit was doing the knowing throughout, which means two years of waiting for a label has been an entry fee that nobody was charging. You are not short of anything at that door.

You do not have to arrive with the diagnosis.