He is forty one and he has been saying it since he was five.
It comes near the end, and there is a particular line about halfway down that everybody says slightly slower, and he has always said it slightly slower too, because that is how it goes.
In March, at a gathering, standing at the back with his own son leaning on his leg, he heard himself say it and something in him stopped and said: what does that actually mean?
Not the whole thing. He knows what most of it means. One line. One image in one line, and he ran it around in his head for the rest of the evening and he could not find the bottom of it.
He has since worked out that he does not know, has never known, and has been saying it, out loud, in a slower voice, at every gathering of his family for thirty six years.
And now he cannot ask.
That is the actual problem, and it took him until about June to admit it in those words. He cannot ask because he is forty one, and because he is one of the ones who is supposed to know by now, and because two of the young ones look at him when it is said, and because there is a particular kind of quiet that would happen if he put his hand up in the middle of a gathering and said, sorry, what does that bit mean.
His auntie would know. She would tell him in about a minute and a half and think nothing of it.
He has been in her kitchen twice since March.
The stones were put there for the asking
Sit down on the rock a minute, because there is a moment in Joshua where a whole practice is set up for one purpose, and the purpose is your question.
They come up out of the river. Twelve stones are carried out and stood up on the bank, one for each tribe, and Joshua says why.
That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean these stones?Joshua 4:6
When your children ask.
The stones are not there to be understood. They are there to be asked about. The not knowing is designed in, and it is designed in on purpose, because a thing that explains itself does not require a conversation and a thing that requires a conversation puts one generation in front of another.
Hear this on the shore. You are not outside your own tradition, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture builds the question into the practice from the very first day, and the Holy Spirit has kept that line unexplained in your mouth for thirty six years and has just brought it up in you at a gathering with your son leaning on your leg.
Now let me name what is really stopping you, because it is not the question.
It is being forty one. It is being one of the ones who is supposed to know, and the specific fear of a small quiet in a room where you have some standing. Nothing written in Scripture puts that fear on you, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who put it there.
That is not vanity. Every man over about thirty five in every family on earth carries a private list of things he should have asked twenty years ago and now cannot, and most of them take the list to the grave and the answers go with the people who had them.
Hear this too, and let it get you out of the chair. You are not diminished by asking, and Scripture is what says so. What is written treats the question as the entire point of the practice, and the Spirit of God is the one who raised it in you in March and did not let it go through the spring, and He does not do that to embarrass a man in front of his relatives.
And now your auntie, because she is the whole of the answer and she is nine miles away.
Think about what that question will be for her.
Somebody is going to sit in her kitchen and ask her what one of the old lines means. She has been carrying that for sixty years and almost nobody has asked her anything about it in twenty, and she has watched it be said at gathering after gathering by people who do not know, and she has never once corrected anybody because that is not how she was raised either.
You think you are going to expose yourself. You are going to hand an old woman the best afternoon she has had in a year.
The stones were stood up so that somebody would ask. Somebody is finally about to.
So this week you drive the nine miles.
Not at a gathering. Not with your hand up in a room. In a kitchen, with the kettle on, in the ordinary way this has always been done.
And you ask her plainly: what does that line mean? I have said it since I was five and I have never known.
Then you let her take as long as she wants, and she will take a long time, and about a third of it will be about somebody who died before you were born, and none of that is a digression. That is how the written word says a handover goes, and the Holy Spirit is in the long way round.
Take your son.
He is small and he will not remember the answer. He will remember that his father drove nine miles and sat in a kitchen and asked an old woman a question about the words, and that will be in him at forty one when the same thing happens to him.
The written word set the stones up so that the asking would come, and the Holy Spirit has kept that line waiting in your mouth for thirty six years until you were ready to go and get it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these in the van before you knock. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who raised this question in you in March according to the written word, so the standing you speak from was never built out of how much of it you understood. Whether the answer is enormous or turns out to be small and plain, the outcome is His to decide, and it is never a measure of a man who said a line for thirty six years.
- Line I do not understand, you are not proof that I am outside this. The Word of God stood twelve stones on a bank so that children would ask what they mean, so the not knowing was designed in, and the asking is the practice working and not failing.
- Fear of the small quiet that would follow a man of forty one putting his hand up, get out of this van, in the name of Jesus. Scripture makes the question the entire point, and the Spirit of God raised it in me in March and would not let it go through the spring.
- Lord, You are the God who set up a sign so that somebody would come and ask, and Your Spirit has kept this line waiting in my mouth for thirty six years. I am driving the nine miles this week and taking my son, and I am asking her plainly.
Joshua 4:6
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