The Anger Nobody Will Let You Say

She got as far as five words on Sunday, and somebody rescued her.

She had said: I am angry with God. And the woman beside her, who loves her and would take the coat off her own back for her, put a hand on her arm and said, very gently, that God's timing is perfect.

She said yes. She said it because she is a kind person and because the woman meant it and because there was a queue behind them for the coffee.

But here is what happened inside. The sentence went back down. It has gone back down about six times now, with six different people, and each of them handed her a reason before she got to the end of it, and every reason was true and not one of them was what she needed.

Because she did the thing. She went without for that specific matter, more than once, and she meant it with everything she had, and it stayed exactly where it was.

And she is not confused about theology. She could preach on the sovereignty of God and do it properly. That is not the trouble. The trouble is that she has a live thing in her chest with nowhere to go, and every route out of it has somebody standing in the doorway with an explanation.

And a sister said, last week, kindly: maybe fast about it again?

She said mm. And what she felt was not hope, and it was not even resentment. It was tiredness of a particular flavor, the tiredness of a woman being handed the same instrument that did not work, by people who will not let her say so.

If there is a sentence in you that keeps getting interrupted, come here and sit down. I am going to let you finish it.

Nobody here is going to explain it to you

Let us establish that first, because it is the only thing that will let the rest of this page be read.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you why it did not move. I do not know why. Nobody writing to you knows why, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing and calling it faith.

You are not being handed a reason, and you were never obliged to have one. That is not evasion dressed up as pastoral care. It is what God Himself did with a whole set of complaints that never got answered, and Scripture kept every one of them exactly as they were spoken, and it is the Holy Spirit who saw to it that they stayed in the book for people standing where you are standing.

And the other thing this page will not do is defend anybody. Not the people who rescued your sentence. They are good and they were frightened, because an angry person makes a room feel unsafe and everybody reaches for a lid. That is what happened at the coffee queue. It was not malice and it was also not help.

God kept a sentence like yours in His own hymnal

There is a psalm that people almost never read out loud in a service, and it is worth seeing what is actually in it.

Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord? arise, cast us not off for ever.Psalm 44:23

That is in Scripture. Sung. Publicly. By a congregation.

And it does not get resolved. If you read the whole of Psalm 44 you will find no turn at the end, no but yet, no tidy landing. It finishes with a request and no answer and God kept it in.

Think about what that means. He was not embarrassed by it. He did not edit it into something more becoming before He allowed it into the collection, and He did not put a note under it explaining what the people had done wrong.

You are allowed to say the whole sentence, and it will not cost you anything with Him. I am not saying that to be permissive: it is what the existence of Psalm 44 demonstrates about God's own tolerance (Psalm 44:23), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes that a room you can actually stand up in.

And your going without bought nothing, because nothing was for sale

Here is the part that needs saying plainly, because a suspicion about it has been sitting there for a long time.

What you went without did not fail. It was never a mechanism, so there was nothing there to fail. It did not fall short of a length and it was not spoiled by your motives and it was not undone by a lack of something in you.

You did not do it wrongly, and nothing about the outcome is a report on your faith. Scripture is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), which means He is not a machine to be operated either, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight off you rather than an argument you would win.

Nobody here is going to promise you it will work next time, and you would not believe them anyway.

Now something said in the open here rather than in small print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.