You Asked a Real One

The biscuits are down to the plain ones. That is roughly how far into the evening it was.

The game had finished, the good biscuits went in the first eleven minutes the way the good biscuits always do, and everybody had drifted into that part of the night where the chairs are at odd angles and two people are still arguing about the game and somebody is lying across a beanbag that lost most of its beans in about 2019.

And you asked it. Out loud. The real one.

Not the polite version you could have asked. The actual question, the one that has been sitting in your chest for about four months, that you have taken out and looked at on the bus and put back again, and you asked it in a fairly ordinary voice because you did not want it to be a whole thing.

It took a second and a half.

That is not an exaggeration and you know it is not, because you have replayed it. One person had a verse ready before you had finished the sentence. Somebody else had an analogy that involved a jigsaw, or possibly a car engine, and it was a good analogy, it just was not about your question. And a third person said, warmly and completely sincerely, that it was a great question, and then answered a different one.

Everyone was kind. Nobody laughed. Somebody put a hand on your shoulder for a second on the way past to the biscuits.

And you said, yeah, thanks, that makes sense, because what else does a person say. And the conversation moved on to whether they can get the good biscuits next week, and you sat there in a room full of people you actually like, holding your question, which was exactly the same size as it had been ninety seconds earlier.

You know this one. You went home, and you did the thing where you scroll for a while without reading anything, and somewhere in there a second question turned up behind the first one, and it was worse than the first one, and it was about you.

If it is such a great question, why did it take a second and a half to deal with, and why am I the only one in that room who seems to still be carrying it around.

Fast does not mean small

Let me start with the mechanics of what happened, because I suspect one conclusion has already been drawn from it, and it is the wrong one.

An answer arriving in a second and a half tells you almost nothing about your question. It tells you the answer was already loaded. Everyone in that room had heard something similar before and had a response filed and ready, and the speed was the speed of a thing being taken off a shelf, not the speed of a thing being thought about.

And here is why I want to be careful about them, because those people are not the problem in this story. When a young person asks a real question in a room, a lot of adults feel a flicker of fear. Not fear of you. Fear for you. They have watched people they love walk out on all of it, and somewhere in them a voice says fix it quickly, make it safe, do not let the silence sit there. So they reach for what they have. The verse was a real verse. The jigsaw was a decent picture. They were not being lazy and they were not dismissing you, and most of them were handed exactly the same fast answers when they asked at your age, so it is genuinely all they have to pass on.

They meant it. It just was not aimed at what you asked.

You are asking from inside the family and not from outside it. Scripture keeps a young man's questions right at the center of the story, and the Holy Spirit lives in a person who wonders exactly as much as He lives in a person who has everything filed, because He came to stay and not to inspect.

Look at what Jesus was doing at twelve years old. His family had gone home. He stayed behind in the temple, and Luke says they found Him sitting in the middle of the teachers, both hearing them and asking them questions, and He was there for three days.

Three days. Not three minutes and a jigsaw. The first thing the record shows Him doing as a young person is sitting in a room full of adults, asking.

And it came to pass, that after three days they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them, and asking them questions.Luke 2:46

You have the same standing in that room that you would have at twenty five or at sixty. It is written that no one is to despise your youth, and the Holy Spirit did not hand out a junior version of Himself to anybody, which means the question you asked came from a member of the household, not from a guest on trial.

The question is not a crack in you

Now the second thing, which I suspect matters more, because it is the one that turned up on the bus later.

Somewhere along the way an idea can settle in: that faith is a smooth surface, and that a question is a crack in it. So the question in your chest starts to feel like evidence, not evidence about God, evidence about you. Everyone else looks settled. And there is this thing you keep carrying about.

That idea is not in the book anywhere.

Look at what Scripture actually kept. A father says, Lord, I believe, help thou mine unbelief, and he gets his son back in the same scene. Thomas says flatly that he will not believe without seeing, and eight days later Jesus turns up and says, reach here your hand, and never once calls him a lesser disciple for it. A prophet opens his own scroll by asking God how long he has to shout before anything happens. Half the psalms are questions. God put all of that in the book on purpose, and He did not attach a note explaining that the questioners were the weak ones.

You are held by something that does not depend on you having no questions. His word says He is able to keep you from falling, and the Holy Spirit does the holding, which is why your grip is not the load-bearing part of this.

There is something else about a question that nobody tends to say to a fifteen year old, so I will say it. A question is a sign that you are actually thinking about God rather than nodding at Him. People who have stopped caring do not carry questions around for four months. They do not take them out on the bus. Whatever else is going on in you, that is not indifference, and it is not the beginning of walking away.

You have a real faith of your own, and it is not a stage you are passing through. Scripture says God works in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and the Holy Spirit is the One doing it, in you, now, at the age you are now.