He Knows the Way You Take

He has a list, and it is a good list, and that is the problem.

He got up earlier. He tried that for four months. He read through the Gospels twice. He went to a midweek thing he does not enjoy and stayed behind afterward twice, which cost him more than anybody there would guess. He fasted, twice, properly. He talked to a man he respects who gave him advice that was kind and useless. He tried praying out loud in the car and praying in silence and praying with a written prayer somebody gave him.

He is not a man who gives up on things. He has done all of it thoroughly, in order, over about fourteen months, and he has kept a sort of mental record of what he tried and what came of it.

Nothing came of any of it.

And here is where he has arrived, and it is not anger and it is not doubt. It is quieter and it is more corrosive than either. He has begun to think that a search this thorough, coming up this empty, must be evidence.

Not evidence that God is not there. He is not going that way and does not expect to.

Evidence about him. That there is something in him, or missing from him, that means the ordinary things everybody else does are not going to work. That he has looked in every direction available to a person and the fact that all four came back empty says something about the man doing the looking.

A righteous man reports the same failure

I want to take you to Job, and not to the famous part. To a passage in the middle where he describes searching, and the description is unnervingly close to your fourteen months.

Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: on the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.Job 23:8-9

Four directions. All four empty. And this is not a wicked man reporting it, and it is not a man in rebellion. This is the man God Himself points to as upright.

Job runs a complete search and finds nothing, in a book where the reader has already been told, in chapter one, that God is entirely engaged with Job's situation the whole time.

That is the single most useful thing in the passage. We get to see both sides at once. From inside, the man reports total absence. From outside, we know it is nothing of the sort. You have been treating an empty search as a report on yourself, and Scripture shows you a man for whom that reading would have been completely wrong. That is not me softening a bleak text; Job 23:8 gives you all four directions and a reader who knows better, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and lays it beside a man with a fourteen-month list.

The one thing he still knew

Then Job says the next thing, and it is the hinge of the whole passage.

But he knoweth the way that I take.Job 23:10

Look at the direction of the knowing. He does not say and eventually I found Him. He does not claim to have located anything. He turns the sentence round entirely, and puts the knowing on God's side.

He cannot see God. God sees him. Those are not the same fact and only one of them was ever load-bearing.

You have been assessing your position by whether you can locate Him, and your position has never once depended on that. The written word puts the knowing on His side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient man's turn of phrase into something true about a man on a hillside at fifty.

I should say what I am not going to do with the rest of that verse. Job goes on to talk about being tried and coming forth as gold, and I am not going to preach it at you, because you did not come here for a reason and I do not know that one applies to you. Anybody who tells you confidently why your fourteen months have been empty is telling you something they made up. I am not going to explain your winter. I am only going to tell you who knows where you are in it.

You are known in a season you cannot get any bearings in. Scripture says He knows the way that you take, without conditions attached to it, and the Holy Spirit has been the one holding that steady through every one of the fourteen months.