Inscrutable

The Answer Is Presence, Not Reasons

“My ears had heard of you but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” Job 42:5-6

I was on a call this morning where people were sharing testimonies. One after another, they were good ones. Real ones. God moving in ways nobody arranged.

And every person on that call was also struggling with something.

I am seventy-four years old. I have watched God do things I could not have engineered on my best day, in countries I had no business being in, through people who had no reason to say yes. I have the journals. I have the prayer letters. The evidence is not thin.

I still woke up this morning asking why.

Why this. Why my daughter’s headaches, the kind that take a day away from her. Why this thing in my own body that will not resolve. Why a road one of mine is walking that I would have given anything to spare him.

I used to shake my head at the Israelites. They saw the sea open. They ate manna off the ground every morning of their lives. They followed a pillar of cloud by day and fire by night, and they still asked, Is the Lord among us, or not? How could they be so slow?

Then I looked in the mirror.

There is a verse in Second Kings I have read a hundred times and never really stopped at. Elisha had asked for a double portion and got it. The widow’s oil. The Shunammite woman’s son raised up. Naaman washed clean in the Jordan. An axe head floating. A whole Syrian army struck blind and led away. Then the text says, plainly, that Elisha had fallen sick with the sickness he would die of. It does not say why. It does not apologize for it. It does not pause.

And from that sickbed the king comes weeping, and Elisha has him take up the bow, and the prophetic word is still on him, undiminished. Then he dies. And later some men burying a body see raiders coming and throw the dead man into Elisha’s grave in a hurry, and he touches the bones, and he stands up on his feet.

So the power had not left him. Not while he was dying. Not after. Scripture never tells us what the sickness was, only that he had it and that it took him.

There is a word for this. Inscrutable. Impossible to interpret. Mysterious, baffling, not easily grasped. I looked it up because I wanted to know whether there was a name for a thing that will not open up no matter how long you sit with it.

John the Baptist sat in a cell with the same problem. This is the man who pointed and said, Behold the Lamb of God. The man who put his own hands on Jesus in the Jordan. And he sent word out of that prison: Are You the One who is to come, or should we look for someone else?

Jesus did not scold him. He sent back a list of what was happening. The blind seeing, the lame walking, the deaf hearing, the poor getting good news. And then, Blessed is the one who is not offended by Me.

He never told him why he was in prison.

Job asked louder than any of us. Thirty-some chapters of asking, and God finally answers out of the whirlwind, and He does not give one reason. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth. Can you bind the Pleiades. Have you walked in the recesses of the deep. Not an explanation anywhere in it. And when Job finally answered, it was not because anything had been explained to him. He had seen.

And it is worth noticing who got in trouble in that book. Not Job, who asked hard and asked angry and wanted to argue his case to God’s face. The friends. The ones who had explanations.

The disciples had one too, standing in front of a man born blind. Who sinned, this man or his parents? Jesus would not take the question. Neither, He said, and turned it toward what God was going to do with him.

I have had the mercy explained to me exactly once that I can remember clearly.

I have told this one before, so I will keep it short. Our first winter in Lanzhou, our baby girl nearly died, and I was finally given permission to fly her out for treatment. Coming back, we sat stranded in Guangzhou for a week with our passports gone. My birthday came and went in that hotel. It was a long time afterward before anyone pointed out that the spot on her lung had needed exactly that many days of clean air before she breathed Lanzhou’s again.

I did not ask for protection in that shape. I would not have recognized it if I had been handed the itinerary.

But that is the one I can tell you the ending of. Most of them I cannot. My daughter’s headaches have not lifted. My own body is doing what it is doing. The road I would have spared my son is still his road, and I do not get to walk it for him.

Job got no reasons either. What he got was a look at God, and he said it was enough. I used to read that as the end of a story. It reads differently when you are standing inside one.

What I notice now is how patient God is with the asking. He did not strike Job down for it. He did not send John a rebuke in his cell. He did not stop being God for one minute while His prophet lay there dying of something the Bible never names.

I quiet myself and come before Him and I do not feel Him answering me. Not the way I want answering. There are no reasons handed over. But there is Him, in the room, in the middle of it, not going anywhere.

And that turns out to be the thing I actually came for.

[The songs from this journey are also gathered in the Spotify playlist “Dancing on Raindrops.”Or, visit the YouTube playlist “Dancing on Raindrops”.]

Reflections

What is the question you have stopped asking God out loud, because you assumed by now He was not going to answer it? Where have you found yourself doing what Job’s friends did, reaching for an explanation when someone needed your company instead? If God gave you His presence and no reasons at all, would that be enough this week?