Doubt, Waiting, and the Reliability of a Promise

These words are written for this archive, please link to this page rather than lifting it elsewhere.

student: I have come back because something has been sitting with me since we last spoke, and I am not certain it is a question so much as an admission.

professor: Those are usually the same thing wearing different clothes. Say it.

student: You told me a man does not fence an empty field. I believed you while you were saying it. And then I walked home and thought, but what if the field is empty in my case. What if I am waiting for something that was never promised to me at all, and I have simply been telling myself a story.

professor: Ah. So the question is not about marriage.

student: No. I do not think it is.

professor: Then let us have it properly. You are not asking whether the walls are good. You are asking whether you are inside them or standing outside looking at someone else's field.

student: Yes. That is exactly it.

professor: Good. Now tell me what you are actually afraid of, because it is not the waiting.

student: I am afraid I misheard.

professor: Of course you are. Everyone who has ever been told anything is afraid of that. Now consider the shape of your fear for a moment. If you had misheard, what would follow?

student: That I had built a great deal on nothing.

professor: And if you had heard correctly?

student: Then I would still be waiting, and it would look exactly the same from where I am standing.

professor: There it is. The two situations are indistinguishable from inside them, and that is the whole of your torment. You are not suffering from doubt about God. You are suffering from the fact that faithfulness and self deception look identical while they are happening.

student: That is a bleak thing to hear said out loud.

professor: It is a great relief to hear said out loud, and you will find that it is, once the shock passes. You have been assuming that your uncertainty is evidence against you. It is not evidence of anything. It is simply the weather in which all promises are held. There has never been a man who received a promise and then had the pleasure of watching it arrive on schedule with no interval in between.

student: Abraham waited a very long time.

professor: And laughed, and lied about his wife twice, and attempted a shortcut with disastrous results. Note that he is nonetheless the example the New Testament reaches for when it wants to describe faith. Not because he waited beautifully. He did not. Because the promise was not resting on the quality of his waiting.

student: I keep asking God to say it again.

professor: Yes. And what does He do?

student: He says it again.

professor: Then I would examine that, rather than examining yourself. You have been treating the repetition as a mark of your weakness. Consider that it might be a mark of His willingness. He has not once, in your account, responded to your asking with impatience. He has responded by speaking.

student: But I feel it should have been enough the first time.

professor: You feel that because you imagine there is a version of you that would have received it perfectly and then rested. There is no such version. There never was. And more to the point, He did not address His promise to that man. He addressed it to you, the one who asks twice, because He is not in the habit of speaking to people who do not exist.

student: You have said something like that before, that the forgetting was accounted for.

professor: I said it and you accepted it as an idea. I am saying it now as a fact about your particular life. When He spoke, He knew precisely who was listening. He knew you would go back and check. He did not speak in spite of that. He spoke to a man who would need it again, which is why He arranged for it to be available again.

student: Then may I ask the question I have been circling?

professor: You have been circling it for an hour. Please.

student: How do I know the difference between a promise from God and a thing I have wanted so much that I began to hear it.

professor: An honest question, and I will not insult you with an easy answer. There are three marks I would look for, though none of them is a proof.

student: I would take marks. I have given up on proof.

professor: The first is that a word from God tends to require something of you rather than merely gratify you. A wish tells you what you will receive. A word from Him almost always tells you what you will become, and the becoming is usually inconvenient. Ask whether the thing you heard has cost you anything.

student: It has cost me a great deal of comfort.

professor: Then it is at least behaving like the real thing. The second mark is stubbornness. A wish rises with your mood and falls with it. It is bright on good days and gone on bad ones. A word from Him has an irritating habit of remaining when you would rather it did not. It will still be there on the mornings you have decided to be done with it.

student: That is uncomfortably accurate.

professor: I thought it might be. And the third is that it does not stay entirely inside your own head. He is not shy about corroborating Himself. He will put it in Scripture you did not go looking for. He will place it in the mouth of someone who knows nothing of your situation. He has been known to arrange the timing of an ordinary morning so that a man is looking in exactly the right direction.

student: You are describing what happened to me.

professor: I am describing what happens, and you may take the particulars as your own or not. But note the pattern. He does not merely tell you a thing and leave you to defend it alone against your own mind for years. He speaks, and then He speaks again from a direction you did not control, so that you cannot easily accuse yourself of having manufactured it.

student: I did not control it. That is what undid me. I was not looking for it.

professor: Which brings me to the last thing I want to say to you, and then I shall stop, because you have carried enough for one afternoon.

student: Please.

professor: You have spent this whole conversation asking whether you may trust what you heard. I want you to notice that you have been asking the wrong party. You keep auditing your own reception, as though the promise were a signal you might have garbled. But you did not send it. You are not responsible for its accuracy. The only question worth your attention is whether the one who spoke is reliable, and that is a question with an enormous amount of evidence attached to it, none of which is about you.

student: So the doubt is not really about the message.

professor: It never is. Doubt of that kind is always a rumor about the character of God, dressed up as humility about yourself. And it is far more comfortable to say I may have misheard than to say I am not certain He keeps His word, though the second is what is actually being said.

student: That is very direct.

professor: You have earned directness. You asked the same question four times from four angles and did not run from any of the answers. That is not the behavior of a man who is deceiving himself. Men deceiving themselves stop asking.

student: What do I do tomorrow, then, when it is quiet again and none of this feels true?

professor: Nothing dramatic. You will not need to. He has told you where He will be, and He is already there, ahead of you, exactly as He said. Your feelings on Tuesday do not relocate Him. Walk toward the place. You know the way, or you would not have come this far arguing about it.

This is one piece of the archive, find the rest of the Student and Professor conversations over on TikTok.