They Did Not Even Ask

The radio is on low on the windowsill, playing something cheerful with a horn section in it, and she is standing at the counter with a knife in her hand and she has not moved for ninety seconds.

Her friend called while the onions were on. Delighted. Breathless. You will never guess, and then the name, and then the news, and it is the exact thing. Not the same category of thing. The thing. The one she has been asking God for since 2014, and she knows the year the way you know a birthday, and she could tell you what she was wearing the first time she prayed it and what the weather was doing.

And she said the right words. She said them warmly and she meant most of them. She said how wonderful, and she asked a question about it to prove she was interested, and she laughed in the right place, and then she said the onions were catching and she would call back.

Now the kitchen is empty and the radio is still going and something has gone cold and green in the middle of her chest.

She is more ashamed of that than of anything else this year.

Because here is the part she has not been able to put down since she hung up. They did not ask. Not once. It was not a thing they had wanted particularly. It was not on any list of theirs. It came the way weather comes, and they were pleased about it in the way you are pleased about weather, and it was handed to them.

Twelve years. She has a Bible with the request written in the front of it and a date under it. She has prayed it in three houses. She has prayed it at four in the morning and she has prayed it standing up in a parking lot with the groceries in the trunk. She has been careful about it, too, careful the way people get: not making demands, not putting a date on God, never once saying out loud to anybody how much she wanted it, because saying it out loud would make her one of those people who cannot be at peace.

And someone who never asked got it on a Tuesday.

She puts the knife down, because her hand is not steady. The onions are catching. The radio finishes the cheerful song and starts another one.

And in the quiet where the burn is she hears the thing that scares her most, which is not envy. It is arithmetic. It is a small voice doing sums, and the sum is: if He gave it to somebody who never asked, then the twelve years were not the reason, and if the twelve years were not the reason, then either He did not hear me or He heard me and said no, and I do not know which of those is worse.

Perhaps you are standing in your own kitchen with the news still in the room. Yours has its own year. You said the right words, and you meant most of them, and then you hung up and stood there.

Fret not is not a scolding

The psalm that speaks to this opens with two words that most people have only ever heard used against them.

Fret not thyself because of evildoers, neither be thou envious against the workers of iniquity.Psalm 37:1

Now the first thing to say is honest: the people in that verse are workers of iniquity, and the person on the other end of your phone call is not. Your friend has not wronged you. Nobody in this story did anything.

But look at the machinery David is naming, because the machinery is identical. The Hebrew behind fret is a word about heat. It is the word for kindling, for a thing catching fire from inside. David is not describing a moral position. He is describing a burn, and he is describing it from the inside, because he had one, and this psalm is a man writing to himself at a counter with a knife in his hand.

You are a hungry person having a human reaction in a kitchen, and Heaven is not shocked by you. Psalm 37 is in the book precisely because a man of God burned like this and the Holy Spirit had it written down instead of edited out, and the Spirit who kept that psalm in the canon is the same Spirit standing in your kitchen at this moment, entirely unsurprised.

And notice what the psalm does not do next. It does not tell David to want less. It does not recommend that he examine himself for greed, or hold his own life up to somebody worse off, or be more thankful for what he has. Not one line of Psalm 37 asks the burning man to shrink.

You have not been disqualified by a feeling that came in through the phone. The written word treats the burn as weather passing through a person rather than a verdict on them, and the Holy Spirit is the One who can tell the difference between what is happening to you and what you are, at a moment when you cannot tell that difference at all.

What the psalm hands him instead

Read what comes two verses later, because this is the part nobody quotes and it is the part you came here for.

Trust in the Lord, and do good; so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.Psalm 37:3, 4

The answer to the burn is food.

Not a rebuke. Not a discipline. Not a technique for looking away. The psalm turns to a man on fire with comparison and puts a meal in front of him, and then, in the very next breath, it uses the phrase desires of thine heart, without a syllable of apology for the fact that he has any.

You are being fed by God on the evening you found out, and the feeding is not being withheld pending a better attitude. That is Psalm 37:3 in its own words, and it is written to somebody mid burn, not to somebody who has finished burning. His Spirit is the One who brings a table into a room where a phone call just landed, and He does not wait outside until you are calm.

Here is the other thing the burn cannot see, and I say it carefully, because I am not going to hand you a consolation about anybody else's life. You are doing arithmetic with a number you do not have. You can see what arrived at their door. You cannot see their table, and you were never given it to look at, and the comparison you are running is between your whole insides and one line of somebody else's news.

You were never told to stop looking. Nobody in this psalm is instructed to close their eyes, and I am not going to instruct you either, because a person told not to look at a thing looks at nothing else for a week. The word says trust and do good and be fed, and being fed is what quiets a burn, not effort, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does the feeding while you are still watching the other window.