The Answer Came Out Whole

The courtyard has strings of lights across it corner to corner, and under them there are nine long tables end to end, and on the tables there is more food than anybody sensible would cook for this many people.

Tarek has been carrying trays since four. Rice, lamb, the salads his cousins argue about every single year. The music is loud enough that the older aunts have moved their chairs to the wall and are conducting the entire wedding from there with their hands.

He steps out past the tables for a minute, to where the cars are parked and the noise thins, holding a small glass of tea he has not drunk any of.

His nephew Ziad comes out after him. Eighteen, in a borrowed jacket, still holding a plate.

Uncle, he says. Can I ask you something real.

Go on.

What do you actually believe. Not what we all say at these things. You.

And Tarek opens his mouth expecting to fumble, and it comes out whole. All of it. Who Jesus is. What He did on the cross and why it had to be Him. That He is alive right now. That He holds a person and does not drop them. It comes out in one clean piece, in his own words, warm, with no hunting for a phrase anywhere in it, and the boy listens and nods slowly and says, right, okay, and squeezes his arm and goes back in to the music.

Tarek stays out by the cars with the tea going cold in his hand.

Because every word of that was true, and he meant every word of it, and he has not lived within a mile of it for longer than he wants to think about. Both things at once. A tin of good oil on a shelf, sealed, unspoiled, never once poured on anything.

You are the one out by the cars, and the answer came out of you whole, and that is exactly what is troubling you.

Nobody is going to tell you it was fake

Let me get one thing off the table immediately, because you may have arrived braced for it.

Nothing in this article is going to suggest that the belief is a performance, or a habit, or the ghost of a childhood. That answer you gave was not a recitation. A recitation stumbles. That came out whole, in your own words, on a question you did not see coming, and things do not come out like that unless they are genuinely in there.

So the faith is real. Say it plainly and let it stand: the faith is real, and the distance is real, and neither one of those is allowed to be used as evidence against the other. People try to settle the tension by demolishing one side of it. Either the belief must be counterfeit, they say, or the distance cannot really be a distance. It is neither. Both are simply true, at the same time, in the same man, holding a glass of tea by the cars.

You are a believer, tonight, in the full sense of the word, and nothing about the last stretch of your life has revoked that. It is written all over the New Testament that faith is a gift given and not a standard maintained, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that whole answer in your mouth in front of your nephew, which He would not have done for a stranger.

The word is very nigh thee

Moses is at the end of everything, giving the last of it to a people about to cross over without him, and he says something that lands directly on a man by the cars.

But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.Deuteronomy 30:14

Look at what he is arguing against. He has just said it is not up in heaven, so that somebody would have to go and fetch it down. It is not beyond the sea, so that somebody would have to cross over and bring it back. He is dismantling, one by one, every version of the idea that the thing is far away and a journey is required to reach it.

And then: it is in thy mouth. Which is precisely where you found it, in the middle of a wedding, when a boy in a borrowed jacket asked a plain question.

Do you see what that means about the distance you have been picturing? You have been imagining a long road back, a crossing, a fetching down. There is no crossing. The word was in your mouth the whole time you thought you were far away, and it proved it by walking out of you unrehearsed in a courtyard.

You have the word in your mouth and in your heart at this moment, and it was put there by God and kept there by God. Deuteronomy 30 says exactly that, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept it whole through every season when you were not tending it, because He has never once been careless with what He deposits in a person.

The nearness was never your project

Now the second thing, and it is the one that takes the weight off your back.

Paul is standing on a hill in Athens talking to people who had no framework for any of it, and he tells them that God made every nation and set their times and their borders, so that they would seek Him and feel after Him and find Him. And then he adds a clause that ought to be underlined in every believer's copy.

Though he be not far from every one of us.Acts 17:27

Not far. Not from anyone. Not from the seeking ones and not from the ones feeling their way with their hands out, and not from a man at a wedding who could give the whole answer and has not spoken to Him properly in a long while.

The nearness of God is not the reward at the end of your effort. It is the standing condition you have been living inside without drawing on it, the way a man with a tin of oil on the shelf still has oil.

You are near to Him right now, and the nearness is His doing and never a thing you have to construct. Acts 17 says He is not far from any one of us, and it is His Spirit who has been the nearness this whole time, closer to you than the boy with the plate was.