Answered in the Twentieth Year

It happened in March, and you have told the story eleven times since, and every time you tell it you can hear yourself putting a shape on it that is not the shape it has inside you.

Twenty years.

You are not going to describe the thing here. It was specific and it was the same request for two decades and it arrived, unmistakably, in a way that even the people who do not pray about anything found difficult to explain away.

Everybody is delighted. Your mother cried. Somebody at church used the word breakthrough, which made something in you tighten, and you did not say why.

Here is why.

You are angry. Not at the answer. At the nineteen years.

At the fourth year, when you stopped telling people. At the ninth, which was the worst one, and which cost something in your family that has not entirely come back. At the fourteenth, when you decided you had been asking for the wrong thing and stopped for eleven months and then started again.

And there is nowhere to put that, because it has arrived in the same season as the answer, and everybody around you is in the middle of being glad.

The psalm asks the question and God keeps it

There is a passage in Psalm 77 that is more honest than most people are comfortable with.

Will the Lord cast off for ever? and will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? doth his promise fail for evermore? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? And I said, This is my infirmity: but I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High. I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old.Psalm 77:7-12

Six questions, and every one of them is an accusation with a question mark on the end. Has His mercy gone. Has He forgotten to be gracious. Has He shut His mercies up in anger.

Those are not the questions of a man being careful. That is somebody saying the thing out loud.

And God kept it. It went into the book. It is sung. Nobody edited it out, and nobody appended a correction, and the psalmist is not rebuked anywhere in the psalm or afterwards.

Then he turns. I will remember the years of the right hand of the most High. He does not say the questions were wrong. He decides what he is going to do with his memory, which is a different act entirely.

You are allowed to say the whole of it in front of God, including the part about the nineteen. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture kept all six of those questions, Psalm 77:7-9, and the Holy Spirit did not require them to be softened before they went into the book.

Nobody else gets to close this for you

Somebody will say it, and several people already have. It was worth the wait. God's timing is perfect. Look how it worked out.

They mean it warmly and they are not being careless. They simply were not there for the ninth year.

That judgement belongs to the man who stopped telling people in the fourth year, and to nobody else on this earth. When somebody makes it on your behalf they take the one thing nineteen years left you with, which is the right to say what they were.

So I am not going to say it. I do not know whether it was worth it.

You are the only one with standing to weigh those nineteen years, and you may take as long as you like. Scripture lets a man ask whether God has forgotten to be gracious without one word of correction, Psalm 77:9, and the Holy Spirit has never once demanded a summary as the price of comfort.

The answer is not a settlement

Here is the arithmetic that has your chest tight while everybody is celebrating.

You have started treating March as a settlement. Nineteen years in one column, an answer in the other, books balanced, and the anger is therefore illegitimate because the account has cleared.

That is not what happened. The years were not installments and March was not a reimbursement. Scripture keeps gift and endurance in separate hands, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit has never once presented anybody with an invoice.

The answer is a gift. The nineteen years are a real cost. Both are true, and neither cancels the other, and Scripture never once required a person to net them off.

You are not being paid out, you are being given something. Scripture says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a man an answer as a receipt for two decades.

Where the anger actually goes

And the practical part, which is the whole reason for this page.

The anger goes to God. Not to your mother, not to the person at church who said breakthrough, and not into the ground where it will sit for another decade.

To Him, out loud, in the words of the psalm if your own will not come. Did You forget to be gracious. Was Your mercy shut up. What was the ninth year for.

That is not blasphemy and it is not ingratitude. It is Psalm 77, and it is in the hymn book, and God has been receiving that particular prayer for three thousand years without flinching.

You are welcome to bring the anger and the gratitude in the same sentence. Scripture says pour out your heart before Him, God is a refuge for us, Psalm 62:8, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to be finished being angry before He will be near him.