Still Full of Questions

She has a list on her phone and it has forty one things on it.

They are not doubts exactly. She would resist that word and she has thought about why. A doubt implies something being eroded, and nothing in her is eroding. These are questions, and most of them are the same questions she had at nineteen, and she is thirty five.

Some are large. Some are the kind that nobody has an answer for and everybody pretends they do. Several are about a specific chapter she reads once a year and has never once come away from settled.

She asked to be filled with the Holy Spirit two years ago in a friend's kitchen with the friend praying beside her, and it was real, and she was crying for a while afterward and did not know why.

The list has not got shorter.

That is what she has been carrying. Not the questions, which she has always had and mostly enjoys. What she has been carrying is the arithmetic that says a person with the Spirit of God in them should presumably not need a list.

She has never said it to the friend who prayed. She would find it disloyal.

The sentence, unsaid: forty one questions is not what a filled person looks like.

You may know that list. The thing you thought this would settle, unsettled, on your phone.

He said both halves in one sentence

There is a moment in Mark where a man is asked whether he believes, and his answer is the least tidy sentence in the Gospels and the most useful.

His son has been ill his whole life. He has just told Jesus that if He can do anything, He should. And Jesus turns the if back on him.

And this is what the man says.

Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.Mark 9:24

Read the two halves. Lord, I believe. And then, in the same breath, without a pause and without a correction, help my unbelief.

He does not choose. He does not resolve it. He states both as true about himself at the same moment, out loud, in public, to Jesus, and the account does not record anybody telling him to pick one.

You are allowed to hold both halves at once, and Mark 9:24 has a man say belief and unbelief in one sentence with nobody in the scene correcting him, and it is His Spirit who takes a shout from a crowd and lands it on a woman with forty one things on a list.

And notice what happens next in the chapter. The boy is healed. Immediately, in the same scene, with the unbelief half still hanging in the air unretracted.

Nothing gets audited in that scene

Consider what Jesus does not do, because it is what she has been bracing for since she was nineteen.

He does not examine the ratio. He does not ask the man how much of him believes and how much does not, or require the second half to be brought up to the level of the first before anything proceeds.

He does not treat the sentence as a problem. He treats it as a request, which is what it is, and the request is granted in the next few lines.

That is worth staying with for a moment, because she has spent two years quietly expecting an examination that never comes anywhere in the account. There is no scene in which the man is taken aside afterward and told that the healing was provisional pending some improvement in the second half of his sentence. The boy gets up, the crowd disperses, and the divided man goes home with him.

You have never once had your ratio examined, because the written word records a divided sentence and an immediate answer with nothing measured in between, and the Spirit of God is what turns a scene in a crowd into two years reread.

And notice the shape of the second half. Help thou mine unbelief. He does not promise to work on it. He asks for help with it, which puts the unbelief itself into the category of things a person brings rather than things they clear up first.

You are able to bring the questions rather than resolve them first, and Mark 9 puts the unbelief in the request rather than in the prerequisites, and the same Spirit who was in that crowd is the one who fills.

Forty one questions is not a shortfall

Now the arithmetic she has been running, because it is worth taking apart.

She assumed that receiving the Spirit would reduce the list, and she assumed it because somewhere along the way she absorbed a picture in which certainty and faith are the same object. They are not, and the confusion is not hers, and it is doing a great deal of damage to a great many thoughtful people.

Certainty is a psychological state. Faith is a direction of trust, and Scripture is full of people who have the second in enormous quantities while conspicuously lacking the first. The man in Mark 9 is one of them and he is not the only one.

Job spends most of a book demanding an explanation. Habakkuk opens by asking how long. A whole class of psalm exists for nothing else, and none of those writers is presented as somebody in a phase. If certainty were the mark of a filled person, a great deal of the Bible would have to be read as a record of people falling short, and nobody has ever managed to read it that way for long.

You were never told the list would shorten, because the written word never once offers certainty as the outcome of receiving, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a relief rather than one more entry on a phone.