It Felt Rude to Ask Twice

She would tell you she is not a person who struggles with faith, and she would be right, and that is exactly the problem.

Something happened to her at twenty three. She has never made a great deal of it, partly because she does not think it is anybody else's business and partly because she is aware of how these things sound. It was real. It changed the direction of a life. She has been living off it in the good sense for nineteen years.

And in the last two years something has gone thin.

She has thought about it carefully, the way she thinks about everything. She has ruled out the obvious things. She is not in a crisis. Her marriage is fine. There is nothing hidden anywhere that she is aware of, and she is a person who would be aware.

What she has worked out, and what she said to exactly one friend in a car and then immediately changed the subject, is that she wants to ask God to do it again and she cannot make herself do it.

Not because she doubts He would. That is not the blockage.

The blockage is that it feels rude.

She is a woman who was raised to write a thank you note the same week. She does not go back to somebody who has given her something generous and ask for another one, because you do not, and because doing so says something about how you received the first.

So the request assembles in her and then dissolves at the last second, every time, on manners.

The sentence, which she has never said and which would embarrass her, is: asking again would mean the first time was not enough for me.

You may know that hesitation. The good thing you will not go back for.

He shouts it at the end of the party

Here is where the invitation gets issued, and the setting matters more than almost anything else in this article.

It is the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. Eight days of celebration, of ceremony, of water carried up from the pool and poured out at the altar every single morning. The city is full. Everybody present has just spent a week at the biggest and most satisfying religious occasion of the year.

And on the last day, at the end of all that, Jesus stands up in the middle of it and shouts.

In the last day, that great day of the feast, Jesus stood and cried, saying, If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink.John 7:37

Consider who is in earshot. Not people who have missed out. People who have just been to the feast. People with the water ceremony still fresh, who could tell you exactly what they had received that week.

And He shouts at them, on the way out, that if anybody is still thirsty they should come.

You are exactly who that shout was aimed at, and John 7:37 puts the invitation at the end of a satisfying week rather than at the start of an empty one, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a shout in a crowded courtyard and lands it on a woman who has been silent about this for two years.

Thirst is not an insult to the last drink

Look at what the invitation makes the condition. Not need in general. Thirst, specifically, which is the condition of somebody who has drunk before.

A person who has never had water does not know they are thirsty in the way she is thirsty. Thirst is a memory operating in a body. It is precisely what someone feels who received something once, knows exactly what it was, and has run down since.

Which means her thirst is not a comment on the twenty three year old. It is evidence that something real happened then.

You have a thirst that proves the first drink rather than insulting it, because the written word makes thirst the only qualification in the sentence and issues the call to a crowd already at the feast, and His Spirit is what turns that from a clever observation into permission she can use.

And notice the verb. He cried. He shouted, in public, on a day when it would have been easier to let everybody go home content. This is not a grudging concession to people who cannot manage on what they were given. It is somebody standing up and raising his voice to make sure nobody leaves thirsty.

You are wanted at that fountain more than you have ever wanted to be there, and John 7 has Him shouting the invitation rather than waiting to be asked, and the same Spirit who moved that crowd moves in a backyard nineteen years later.

Manners are not the same as reverence

Now the actual blockage, which deserves respect because it comes from something good in her.

Her manners are real virtue. Gratitude that does not go back for more is a decent instinct in ordinary life and it has made her a person other people trust. Nothing here is a criticism of how she was raised.

But manners are calibrated for a world of limited supply, where a second ask genuinely costs the giver something. That world is the only one any of us practice in, so the instinct transfers without anybody noticing, and it lands on a God for whom the calculation does not exist.

You were never at risk of costing Him anything, because John 7:37 has the offer shouted to an entire city with no limit set anywhere in the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a door rather than an argument about theology.