They Always Say Anything Is Fine

You always ask. That is the part nobody gives you credit for.

You are not the person who guesses and hopes. You go straight to the source, every time, and you ask the direct question. What would you like.

And every time, from almost everybody, you get the same three answers.

Anything. Honestly, do not worry about it. Whatever you think.

And you stand there holding an answer that is not an answer, and something in you goes very quiet, because it has started to feel like the answer means something about you.

Like they would tell somebody else. Like a person who really knew them would not have needed to ask, and the asking itself was the failure, and the anything is fine is a polite way of saying so.

I want to tell you what is actually happening, because it is not that, and it has never once been that.

Thou hast searched me and known me

Here is the opening line of one of the most personal psalms in the book.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. (Psalm 139:1, King James Version)

Two verbs, and the order of them is the whole thing.

Searched, then known. Not known instantly and effortlessly. Searched, first. The psalm opens by saying that the knowing came out of a searching, and it says it about God, who did not need to and did it anyway.

Read that again with your own situation next to it, because it has something to say about the question you keep asking.

You have been treating the searching as evidence that you failed, and Psalm 139:1 puts the searching first and calls it the way a person comes to be known. The Holy Spirit is the one who wrote that order into the verse, and He wrote it that way round on purpose.

If searching were a sign of not knowing somebody well enough, that verse would be an embarrassment. It is not an embarrassment. It is the opening line of the psalm, said with warmth, and the whole rest of the psalm is a person delighting in having been searched out.

Being searched out is what being loved feels like from the inside.

You are doing the loving thing every time you ask, and it is written that the searching is what produced the knowing rather than what exposed the gap. The Spirit of God is the one who put a habit of asking in you, and He has never once read it as a failure to already know.

Now the practical part, because there is a real problem here and it is not the one you think.

The question is too big to answer

What would you like.

Sit with that question from the other side of it for a second. Somebody you love turns to you and asks you what you would like, out of everything that exists, with no limits given and no clues about scale.

The mind goes completely blank. Not because there is nothing. Because there is everything, and no edges anywhere, and a blank is what a mind does with a question that has no edges.

So they say anything. Anything is not a wall. Anything is a person telling you, in the only words available, that the question was too large to get hold of.

You were never being shut out, and Scripture shows a searching that goes into detail rather than one that asks a person to summarize themselves. His Spirit is the one who takes the sting out of an answer like that, and He takes it out by explaining it rather than by softening it.

Read further into that psalm and look at what the searching actually notices. Sitting down and standing up. A word before it reaches the tongue. A path and a lying down. Small, specific, physical, ordinary things.

None of it is grand. All of it is close up.

You have been given the shape of the real question, and Psalm 139 searches out the sitting down and the rising up rather than asking anybody to name what they want out of everything. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a small question feel like being known, and a large one feel like an exam.

So the fix is a smaller question. Much smaller.

Ask something with edges on it

Not what would you like. Try one of these instead.

What was the best afternoon you had this year. What do you always run out of. What did you keep meaning to do and never got round to. What is the thing in your house you would grab first.

Every one of those has edges. Every one of them can actually be answered by a real person standing in a kitchen with about four seconds of thought.

You have four questions in front of you that a real person can answer standing up, and it is written that the searching went at the sitting down and the rising up rather than at a summary. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes the small question the one that opens somebody.

And the answers to those questions are the raw material. Not the gift itself, usually. The material.

You are three sentences from something you could actually build on, and it is written that the searching notices the sitting down and the rising up rather than the summary of a life. The Spirit of God is the one who turns a small honest answer into something that lands, and He has been doing that in ordinary kitchens for a very long time.

There is one more thing, and it is the part that will free you fastest.

The people saying anything are not withholding. Most of them have never once been asked a question specific enough to answer, by anybody, in years. They are not protecting a secret. They are out of practice at being searched out, and the big question does not give them anywhere to start.

You are not being kept out of anything, and Psalm 139:1 says a person can be searched and known rather than only guessed at. The Holy Spirit is the one who opens a person up with a small question, and the smallness is doing the work rather than any cleverness in it.