Still Asking After Everything

The Wednesday night thing is over and Warren is still in the side room where the prayer team meets, because he has a card in his hand and he cannot write anything on it.

They are little cards. Cream colored, about the size of a postcard, with a line at the top for a name and five ruled lines under it, and there is a coffee can of golf pencils on the table beside the stack. Warren has been filling these in for nineteen years. He is good at it. He writes small and he writes exactly, because he learned a long time ago that a vague prayer is a hard thing to recognize when it is answered.

Out in the hall a young man is stacking chairs six at a time and the metal is banging. The urn is still on, ticking as it cools. There are four cookies left on the plate and nobody is coming back for them.

Here is Warren's problem, and he would not be able to explain it to the young man stacking chairs without sounding either ungrateful or unwell.

His daughter came back. Four years of nothing, and then a Tuesday in October, and now she calls on Sundays and she brought the baby at Christmas. His brother spoke to him again after nine years over a thing so old that neither of them can accurately remember what it was about. The surgery went the way surgeries are supposed to go and did not go the way he had lain awake being sure it would. The house sold in eleven days. All of it. Everything he ever wrote small and exactly on one of these cards, in nineteen years, has been answered, and he can put his finger on where he was standing when he found out about most of them.

So he has the pencil and the card and there is nothing to write on it.

And the strange thing, the thing that has him standing in an empty side room at half past eight, is that he has never in his life been hungrier. Not for anything. Not for a single item he could put on the five ruled lines. His hands are actually unsteady with it and he could not tell you the name of it.

The nearest he can get is a sentence he would rather chew glass than say out loud in this building.

I want more of You.

He hears it in his own head and he flinches at it. After all that. After the daughter and the brother and the surgery and the house. Greedy old man, he thinks. Sixty-six years old and still standing here with his hand out.

He puts the card back on the stack, blank, and puts the pencil in the coffee can, and turns off the light on his way out.

Paul wrote this at the end, not at the beginning

There is a sentence Paul wrote that has no business existing, and every hungry person ought to see it at least once.

That I may know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his sufferings, being made conformable unto his death.Philippians 3:10

Consider who is writing. This is not a young convert making a list. This is a man decades in, writing from custody, who has planted churches across an empire, been caught up into the third heaven, seen the risen Christ on a road with his own eyes, and had God work miracles through handkerchiefs off his body. If there were ever a man entitled to be finished asking, it is the man holding this pen.

And what he writes is that I may know him.

Not that I may know more about him. Not that I may finish. He is still reaching. At the end of everything, the great apostle has one line on his card and the line is a Person.

You are in the oldest and best company there is when your hand is still out after everything, and nothing about that puts you outside anything. I am not saying that to make you feel better. Philippians 3:10 is written by a man with more answered prayer behind him than anyone reading this, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a sentence out of a prison letter and stands it up in a side room at half past eight beside a blank card.

Notice too what is missing from that verse. There is no apology in it. Paul does not write forgive me for still wanting. He does not soften it or explain himself. He states his hunger like a man stating an address.

You have no apology to make for this, and there was never a point in your walk where the asking was supposed to stop. Scripture ends with the Spirit and the bride saying come, which is a written line of the hungry still asking, and the same Spirit who says it in that verse is the One who has been saying it in you all week.

The word greedy does not belong to you

Now I want to take a word off you, because you put it on yourself and it does not fit and it has been doing damage.

Greed wants to take. Greed wants more of a thing so that somebody else has less of it, and its whole nature is accumulation. Look at what you are actually asking for. There is no quantity of God. Wanting more of Him takes nothing from anybody, deprives no one, corners no market, and cannot be hoarded. It is the one appetite in the universe with no victim.

What you have been calling greed is the exact thing Jesus called blessed.

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled. Sit with the shape of that. He does not say blessed are the full. He calls the hungry blessed while they are still hungry, and then He promises filling, and the filling has never yet ended the hungering in anybody who has walked with Him for long. The filled ones are the hungriest people in any room. That is not a fault in the design. That is the design.

You are blessed in this exact condition, standing here with your hand out and nothing to write down. Matthew 5:6 is a written beatitude spoken over people while they are still hungry, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes it off a hillside and lays it over a man in a side room who has just called himself a greedy old man.

So let me be plain about something, because this category is where writers usually cheat.

I am not going to resolve this for you. The hunger you are carrying is not going to be talked away tonight, and it is not supposed to be. It is going to be aimed. There is a difference between a hunger that is cured and a hunger that finally knows where to stand, and only one of those is on offer, and it is the better one.

You were made with a capacity that only He fills, and it has been ache and evidence at the same time this whole time. The written word says as the deer pants after the water brooks so panteth my soul after God, and the Spirit of God is not embarrassed by a thirsty man. He is the one who put the thirst there and He knows exactly what it is for.