I Am Embarrassed To Ask A Basic Question

You have looked up the same thing three times because you keep forgetting what it is called.

It is the thing under the sink. Or the thing on the wall by the meter, or whichever one it is for you, and the reason you cannot retain the word is that you have never once heard anybody say it out loud in a room.

You have read it. Three times. On a phone, at eleven at night, in a browser window you closed quickly.

And your neighbor has been doing this for twenty two years and would tell you in about nine seconds, with his hands, standing in front of it, and you would remember it forever because that is how human beings learn things.

And you have not asked him.

You have thought about asking him. You got as far as the front step once, in the spring, with a perfectly good reason to be over there, and you talked about something else for four minutes and came home.

Because the question would be asked by a woman who owns a house and does not know what that is called. And you would be in the room while that happened.

Reading is safe and it does not work

Let me put the two methods side by side, because one of them has been winning for a year and it is the worse one.

Reading it at eleven at night is private. Nobody sees. If it turns out to be something you should obviously have known, the only witness is you, and you close the window and nothing has happened.

And it does not stick. Three separate evenings have proved that.

Asking your neighbor costs about nine seconds of exposure and it works permanently, because it comes with a hand pointing at an actual object and a face and a small story about the time his went wrong.

You have been paying a year of not knowing in order to avoid nine seconds.

You have been choosing the method that does not work in order to avoid being seen, and nine seconds of exposure has never once been worth a year of looking it up. The Holy Spirit is the one who put that promise in the mouth of a man writing about trials, and it is written in James 1 that if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not.

And I want you to look at the word that is doing the most work in that verse, because it is the whole answer to the thing on the front step.

Upbraideth not.

That is an old word for scolding, for reproaching, for the small unkind noise a person makes when somebody asks a question they think is beneath them. And James puts it in, specifically, because he knows exactly what stops people asking.

You have a God who gives without the noise you are afraid of, and no question anywhere has ever once been met by Him with a sigh. James 1 says He upbraideth not, and the Spirit of God is the one who thought that needed saying out loud in the promise.

Let him ask of God

Here is the verse, and I want the whole of it.

If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. (James 1:5, King James Version)

If any of you lack wisdom.

Notice that it opens by naming the condition without softening it. Lack. Not partially understand. Lack, meaning do not have.

And the instruction that follows is not study. It is not work it out. It is ask, which is the exact thing you have been unable to do on a front step.

You are permitted to be a person who lacks something and says so, and no verse anywhere has ever once asked somebody to stop lacking before they could ask. The Holy Spirit is the one who arranged it in that order, and the written word names the lack plainly and puts the asking straight after it.

And then liberally, which means generously, without measuring, without counting how many times you have asked already.

That last part is the one to take to the front step. Your neighbor is not God and I am not going to pretend he is. But you have been imagining a scarcity that is not in the character of the God who made him, and you have been imagining it about a man who has been waiting twenty two years for somebody to be interested in the thing on his wall.

You are approaching a question as though there were a limit on asking, and there has never once been a count kept anywhere on how often somebody asked. James 1 says He giveth to all men liberally, and the Spirit of God is the one who set the supply that way.