Asking the Host Again

The lamps have been lit for an hour and the bread has gone round twice, and Yusuf has now asked three times.

The first time was at the door, which is allowed. Everybody asks at the door. He said he did not want to put anyone out, and his host laughed and took his bag off his shoulder before he could finish the sentence, and that should have been that.

The second time was over the meal. He said it lightly, the way a man does when he wants the answer again but does not want to be seen wanting it: I can easily go to my cousin, it is only forty minutes. The table said no, in four voices at once, and somebody put more rice on his plate to end the discussion, and the discussion ended.

The third time is now. The children have been carried off to bed. The tea has gone cold in the small glasses and been refilled hot. And Yusuf, looking at the courtyard wall rather than at anyone, says: you are sure. You are sure it is all right.

There is a small silence. Not an offended one. His host is a patient man, and he has known Yusuf since they were both nine years old, and something in him understands that the question is not about a bed.

"Yusuf," he says. "Your bag is inside. Your bed is made. My wife made it herself, and she made it before you came. What would you like me to do, write it down for you?"

And Yusuf laughs, because it is funny, and the tea is good, and the lamps are swinging a little in the warm air. And then he goes quiet again, because the terrible thing, the thing he would not say out loud in this courtyard or any other, is that yes. He would like it written down. Not because he doubts the man. Because there is something in him that cannot hold a welcome for longer than about twenty minutes at a time, and it has been like that his whole life, and it is like that with God most of all.

You have asked God the same question tonight, in some form. You may have dressed it up as humility or as taking it seriously. But if you are honest about the shape of it, you have been standing in the courtyard of the house that took you in, asking the Host, again, whether you are really staying.

Somebody already thought of writing it down

Let me say the pit plainly before we go near the way out of it, because a man who keeps asking has usually been told to stop asking, and being told to stop is not the same as being answered.

The exhausting part is not the doubt. It is the short shelf life of the answer. You get it settled on a Tuesday. By Thursday the settling has evaporated and you are back at the door with your coat half on, and you have started to suspect that a person who needs the answer this often is a person for whom the answer was never really given. That is the quiet cruelty in it. The asking becomes the evidence.

So hear what an old man did about exactly this, a long time ago, for people exactly like you. John had written a whole letter to a group of believers who had been badly shaken. Near the end he stops and tells them, in one sentence, why he bothered.

These things have I written unto you that believe on the name of the Son of God, that ye may know that ye have eternal life.1 John 5:13

Read what he says he wanted. Not that you may hope. Not that you may feel it strongly on a good week. That ye may know. And read what he did about it: he wrote it down. The Holy Spirit moved a man to put a thing in writing so that people who cannot hold a welcome for twenty minutes at a time would have something they could go back and look at when the holding failed.

You have a written word underneath you, and it was written for exactly this, because the one who breathed it knew the kind of person who would need it. That is not my kindness to you in a courtyard. It is the stated purpose of a letter, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence written to shaken people in the first century across to a man asking his host for the fourth time tonight.

The welcome does not thin out because you asked again

Here is the thing that has quietly gone crooked, and it is worth naming because it runs everything. You have been treating your certainty as the thing you are standing on. So when the certainty gets thin, you conclude the ground has gone.

But the ground was never your certainty. Yusuf's bed was made before he arrived. It was made by somebody else, in a room he had not seen, out of a decision that had nothing to do with how confident he was feeling when he walked up the lane. The asking did not build it and the asking does not unbuild it.

You are held by a finished work and not by your grip on it, right now, in this courtyard, on the fourth asking. It is written that Christ died for the ungodly while we were still without strength (Romans 5:6), which is to say the arrangement was made while nobody involved was feeling sure of anything, and the Spirit who put that sentence down is the one making it land on you now.

And notice what the host did not do. He did not grade the question. He did not say, well, since you have asked three times, the offer has been downgraded to the couch. Nobody who loves you does that, and God does not do it either. You have not spent down your welcome by needing it repeated.

What a feeling is for, and what it is not for

One more crooked thing, and then we will get to the doing.

Somewhere you picked up the idea that the proof is supposed to arrive as a sensation. A settled warmth. A quiet in the chest. So you have been checking the chest, and on the mornings the chest is quiet you have felt safe, and on the mornings it is not you have gone looking for the door.

A feeling is a wonderful thing and it is a terrible foundation, because it is weather. It moves. It moves for reasons that have nothing to do with God: a bad night, a hard conversation, a body that is tired. If your standing rose and fell with your weather, then your standing would belong to your weather, and it does not. It belongs to Christ.

You have a life that is hidden in Him and it is not stored in your chest where your moods can reach it. Scripture puts it exactly there, that your life is hid with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that written line and makes it steadier under a man than his own pulse is.