Now Mine Eye Seeth Thee

It has been eleven years and she can state her position on it clearly, which is part of the problem.

She is not angry, or not in a way anybody would notice. She goes to church. She would tell you she believes, and she would be telling the truth.

But there is a thing that happened, and it is not going to be described, and about a year afterward she arrived at a settlement with God which has held ever since and which she has never renegotiated.

The settlement is: I will believe, and I will attend, and I will be a decent person, and I am not giving You anything else until You tell me why.

She has never said it out loud. It is not the kind of thing you announce. But it is entirely operative, and it governs a great deal, and when people talk about intimacy with God she thinks, without heat: I am owed a conversation first.

Eleven years. And she has read the book everybody sends people to, twice, and got no further than everybody else does.

If you have got a settlement like that, come and sit down on the step. Nothing here is going to explain anything.

He asked for exactly what she is asking for and did not get it

Here is what actually happens at the end of that book, and it is not what most people remember about it.

Job spends the whole middle of it demanding a hearing. Not a small thing: he wants to lay his case out, he wants God to answer him, he says explicitly that he would take his cause to God's own seat and fill his mouth with arguments. It is the most sustained demand for an explanation in the Bible and it goes on for chapters.

And God does turn up. That is the extraordinary part. He answers out of the whirlwind and speaks at length.

And He does not explain.

Not a word about the wager at the start, which the reader has been given and Job never is. Not one sentence about why. What God does instead is ask him about seventy questions about the world, about the sea and the stars and a horse and an ostrich, none of which addresses the case at all.

And then Job says this.

I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee.Job 42:5

He did not get the explanation. He got the Person, and he says the encounter was of a different order from everything he had known before, and it ends there.

You are asking for what he asked for, and it was already asked at length by somebody God did not rebuke for asking. Job 42:5 is where that sits, at the end of a book where the explanation is never given, and the same Spirit who let the whole demand stay in the record is the one who keeps a woman on a step from thinking her question is out of order.

The settlement is holding something shut that she wants open

Now the hard part, said carefully, because she has held this position for eleven years and did not adopt it lightly.

Her terms are reasonable. In any human arrangement they would be. If a person did something to you that you could not understand and would not discuss, holding back until they explain is not petty, it is sane, and most counselors would say so.

But look at what the settlement is actually doing to her.

It has made an explanation the door. And on the evidence of the one book in the Bible written about exactly this, the explanation is not coming. Which means she has made the condition of her return a thing that God, in the clearest case He has ever addressed, chose not to give.

So the settlement is not protecting her from anything. It is a door she built and put a lock on, and she is holding the only key, and the terms she set mean she can never use it.

And here is the part that matters most: Job did not withdraw the demand. Read it again. He never says the question was wrong or that he should not have asked. Something else simply happened that was larger than the question, and the question stopped being the door without ever being answered.

You are not required to withdraw the question in order to come back, and you never were. He promised it, in the way God's own verdict at the end of that book was that Job had spoken rightly about Him while the comfortable explainers had not (Job 42:7), and His Spirit does not ask anybody to pretend the question has closed.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing on this site is a lever. Nothing here suggests that any practice produces an explanation, or an outcome, or moves God to speak. There is no mechanism and there never was one, and a page that offered you one about a thing like this would be the worst kind of dishonest.

And nothing here is going to explain your eleven years, or hand you a reason, or suggest that somebody with more faith would have found one. What happened is not being made sense of on this page.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling a counselor is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right, and none of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's resolution.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.