Nine Times I Have Asked

Nine. She has the list in her head and could give you the names in order.

Two years. Every one of them turned her down and every single one of them was kind about it, which she has decided is the part that does the damage.

Nobody said no. That is what she would want understood. They said things like: oh, I would love to, but the girls have swimming. And: send me the details and I will see. And, from one woman who she genuinely thought would come: I am just not sure that is my thing.

The nine reasons were all true. She has checked herself on that at three in the morning several times and they were all true. Nobody was lying and nobody was avoiding her.

She goes to the same three places every week. A woman with dementia who does not know her any more and is glad to see her every time as though it were the first. A family who are in something she cannot fix. And a man of ninety who talks about a war for the first twenty minutes and about his wife for the last four.

She does all of it alone.

Here is the thing that happened in June, and it is the reason for this article.

Somebody asked her whether she ever took anybody with her, and she said, without any pause at all: no, I prefer it on my own.

That was not true when she said it. She listened to herself say it and knew it was not true, and knew also that it was going to become true if she said it a few more times, and that she has already started saying it.

She has not asked anybody since March.

Take Mark and bring him with thee, four lines after Demas left

Sit down a minute, because there is a letter written by a man with a shorter list than yours, and the two sentences you need are on the same page.

It is the last letter Paul writes. He is in prison and it is not going well.

He says Demas has forsaken him, having loved this present world. He says at his first defense no man stood with him. He names two more who went.

And then, in the middle of all of it, he writes this.

Only Luke is with me. Take Mark, and bring him with thee: for he is profitable to me for the ministry.2 Timothy 4:11

Take Mark and bring him with thee.

He is still asking. In the same letter, four lines from the sentence about being forsaken, a man with every reason in the world to have concluded that people do not come is arranging for somebody to be brought to him.

And note who it is. Mark, who had walked off a mission years earlier and caused an argument sharp enough to split Paul and Barnabas over it. Even that one. He is asking for even that one.

Hear this in your own kitchen. You are not out of people, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has a man on his last letter still sending for company, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has gone with you to all three houses every week for two years, so nine refusals were never a finding about you.

Now let me name what the ninth one cost, because you have not costed it and it is the reason March happened.

Nine kind noes are harder than one hostile one.

A hostile no can be dismissed. A kind no, with a real reason, from somebody who genuinely would have liked to, leaves you nothing to be angry at and no story to tell about it. It just quietly adds one more piece of evidence to a case you never meant to open, and after nine pieces the case closes itself and the verdict is: people do not come with me.

That verdict is what you were defending in June when you said you prefer it. It was not a lie exactly. It was armor.

Hear this too, and let it come off. You are not somebody people will not go with, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has the greatest asker in the New Testament writing a letter full of people who did not come and still asking on the next line, and the Spirit of God has never once treated a refusal as a report on the one who asked.

And let me say the careful thing this category requires, because it matters. If nobody ever comes, you are not failing and you are not being punished. There are seasons and streets and situations where there genuinely is no one, and the reader in that position is not further from God than anybody else on this page.

The action is the asking. That is what is in your hands and it is the whole of what is in your hands.