I Searched Myself For A Reason

You have been through your own conduct looking for the cause, and you have found four candidates and no answer.

You put the prices up in May. You turned down that job in June, which you still think was right. You were short with somebody on the phone in July, once. And there is a thing from two years ago you keep coming back to even though you know it cannot be connected.

Four candidates. Four different theories of what you did. And no way at all of testing any of them, because the month is not a crime with evidence, it is a month.

And the searching does not stop. It starts at about eleven at night and again at about four in the afternoon when the day has gone quiet and there is nothing to hold your attention.

I am not going to tell you how to fix the month, because that would be strategy and there is none of that here. And I am not going to tell you the quiet is God teaching you something, because I do not believe that and the tenant file for this site forbids it. I am going to talk about who does the searching.

Search me, O God

There is a line at the end of Psalm 139 that is one of the bravest things anybody has ever said, and it is a request.

The psalm has been about being completely known, and at the end of it David asks for something rather than defending himself.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts. (Psalm 139:23, King James Version)

You have somebody to hand the searching to, and it has never once been your job to run the investigation. Psalm 139:23 has a man ask God to do the searching rather than doing it himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that to a bottom stair with a notebook on somebody's knees.

Notice who holds the lamp in that verse. Not the man. He asks God to search, which means the searching gets done by somebody who actually knows, and by somebody who is not frightened of what He finds.

And notice what happens next in the psalm, which is nothing dramatic. He asks to be searched and then asks to be led. There is no list produced and no verdict delivered.

You are able to ask and then stop looking, and the asking has never once required you to find something first. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a request at the end of a psalm reach a woman with four theories and no evidence, and Psalm 139:23 puts the lamp in God's hand rather than in the man's.

Why there are four

Let me say why there are four candidates, because the number itself is the clue.

A search that is looking for a cause will always find one, and then another, and then another, because every month of every working life contains four things a person could have done differently. Four is not a finding. Four is what happens when you look.

You were running a search that cannot come back empty, and it has never once been able to tell you anything true. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what her own method guarantees, and the written word has the searching handed to God in Psalm 139:23.

And the four do not add up to the size of the quiet. That is the thing that keeps you going back. Your mind is looking for a cause proportionate to the silence, and there is not one, because a quiet month mostly is not caused by a person at all.

Things go quiet. Not as a lesson and not as a message. They simply do, and then they do not.

You are not the cause of everything that happens around you, and you never were. His Spirit is the one who takes an investigation out of a woman's hands without telling her she is careless, and Psalm 139:23 asks God to do the knowing because He is the one who actually can.

Hand it over, then work

So here is the exercise, and it is two sentences and a task.

Say it out loud. Search me, O God, and know my heart. Then say, and I am going to stop looking now. Two sentences, said once, wherever you are sitting.

You are able to hand the searching over, and handing it over has never once been avoidance. Psalm 139:23 has the search requested from God rather than conducted by the man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible for a woman who has been at it since May.

Then close the notebook. If there were four theories written down, and there usually are, close it. Do not tear the page out, which makes it dramatic. Just shut it and put it on a shelf.

Then do one ordinary piece of the work that nobody has asked for yet. Something that is simply the work, done today, not aimed at solving anything.

You were never the one who had to find the reason, and the work has never once been waiting on you finding it. The Spirit of God carries a woman out of her own courtroom and into her own week, and the written word has a man ask to be searched and then ask to be led in Psalm 139:23.