I Stopped Asking Out Loud In Front Of Them

She can date it. It was a Tuesday in the autumn three years ago, and about forty people were there, and she asked out loud, plainly, the way she had been asking for years.

Nothing happened. That is not a complaint and it is not unusual. Most of the times she has asked, nothing visible has happened, and she has never once thought that was a scandal.

What was different that night was the faces. She was at the front, so she could see them, and she watched about forty people go quietly and kindly from expectant to careful over the course of perhaps ninety seconds. Nobody was disappointed with her. They were disappointed for her, which is worse, and one woman touched her arm afterward in a way that she has not been able to forget.

She has not asked out loud since. Three years. She asks in her car, and at home, and at four in the morning, and she asks with more heat than she ever did in public.

But in that room she now says careful things: that God is faithful, that He moves as He wills, that we are open to whatever He wants. All true. None of it asking.

If you stopped asking in public to protect the room, come and sit at the table. Nobody in that congregation is going to be criticized here.

She is protecting them from something that is not a wound

Let us name what she decided that Tuesday, because she decided it in about ninety seconds and has been keeping it for three years.

She decided that asking and receiving nothing visible, in front of people, damages them. And so she took the asking private, out of love, to spare forty people the experience of watching a leader ask and go unanswered.

But look at what that quietly teaches the room. It teaches that asking is only safe when the outcome can be managed, which is exactly the thing she would never say from the front and would refuse to sign her name to.

And there is a cost to her too. She has become a woman who says true things in public and asks only in a car.

You are not protecting anybody. Nothing about being seen to ask and receive nothing visible has ever harmed a room the way silence does. I am not saying it to push a leader into a risk. Scripture says neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee (2 Chronicles 20:12), which is a leader saying the unmanaged thing out loud in front of everybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it hold in a woman at four in the morning.

The unmanaged sentence, said at the front

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off one person in that congregation.

Read where Jehoshaphat is standing when he says it, because the setting is the whole weight of it.

O our God, wilt thou not judge them? for we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.2 Chronicles 20:12

Neither know we what to do. He is at the front, in front of all Judah, with their wives and their children standing there, and that is the sentence he says out loud. He does not manage it. He does not soften it into something that would survive being unanswered.

And the last clause is not a prediction. Our eyes are upon thee is a posture, not a forecast, and it commits him to nothing about what happens next.

You may say the unmanaged thing at the front, and Scripture has a leader do it with the whole assembly watching. That is written into the account itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman three years into a careful silence.

Nobody in that room is being blamed

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about forty people whose faces did something honest.

They were not judging her. What she saw on those faces was care, and the woman who touched her arm meant exactly what the gesture meant. A congregation that goes careful when its leader asks and nothing visible happens is a congregation full of people who love her and did not want her hurt.

And nothing here is nudging her toward a room where more happens. This is her building, these are her people, and there is not one sentence on this page suggesting otherwise.

You are asking for this again, here. The fire that stayed is the one you want, not the one you remember. Scripture says how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him (Luke 11:13), where the asking is named and the outcome is left entirely with Him, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a visible result in front of forty people, who is the object of it.

And if these three years have cost more than the friends at that table know, if sleep has gone, if the Tuesdays have started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people, and a woman at the front is not exempt from needing it.