He Is the Funny One and He Has Not Been Asked Anything Else in Years

He can do it from a standing start. He does not need a warm-up and he does not need a good day.

Somebody says something, he says the thing back, the room goes, and it is done inside about two seconds. He has been doing it since he was small and he is extremely good at it, and it has genuinely made his life easier in a lot of rooms.

Here is what he worked out at a cookout in July. Somebody asked him how he was. He did the bit. They laughed and moved on.

That was the whole exchange, and it was the fourth one like it that afternoon, and he could not remember the last time anybody had asked him a second question.

He is not blaming them. He built the door. He put it there himself and it works so well that nobody looks for another one, and now he does not know how to stand in a doorway without doing something.

Somebody made a study of the material

There is a psalm about being made, and the striking thing about it is the level of detail.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well. (Psalm 139:14, King James Version)

Fearfully and wonderfully made.

Read the two verses around it if you can. The writer talks about the inward parts, about being covered in a womb, about substance being seen before there was anything to see.

That is not a compliment about a personality. That is somebody describing a piece of work at the level of its construction.

And the man saying it is not doing a bit. He is not being charming about God. It is a plain statement about a made thing.

You are described as a piece of work somebody made on purpose. Psalm 139 catalogs the making rather than praising the presentation, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old description of construction land on somebody who is only ever asked for the one thing.

The same psalm asks to be examined

Nine verses later, that psalm does something people rarely quote.

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

He asks for the examination.

That is not what a man does with a room. In a room you manage the exposure. You give the bit, you hold the door, you keep the traffic moving.

He asks the opposite of that, and he asks for it after spending twenty verses saying God already knows everything anyway.

He is not offering information. He is asking to be looked at by somebody who was going to look regardless.

You are searched by somebody who does not need to be entertained first. Psalm 139 asks for the examination rather than avoiding it, and it is His Spirit who makes being looked at closely feel survivable.

A prophet told God the flat truth

There is a scene where a man who had just done the most impressive thing in his whole career sits down under a tree and says something with no performance in it at all.

But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die; and said, It is enough; now, O LORD, take away my life; for I am not better than my fathers. (1 Kings 19:4)

It is enough. That is a flat sentence. There is nothing clever in it.

And look at what God does next. He does not correct him. He sends him food, twice, and lets him sleep, and only afterwards does He ask him a question.

The passage does not treat the flat sentence as a failure of attitude. It treats it as information, and it responds with a meal.

You are met with a meal rather than a correction when the material runs out. 1 Kings 19 has God feeding him before questioning him, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old scene under a tree feel like it has room in it for somebody who has run out of bits.

Jesus asked the second question

There is a small moment in John where a man is being introduced to Jesus and he is skeptical about it, and he says so out loud in a slightly funny way.

Then Jesus says something that goes past the joke entirely.

Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before that Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig tree, I saw thee. (John 1:48)

I saw thee.

Whatever was happening under that tree, it was not a performance, because there was nobody there. And Jesus opens the conversation by naming it.

Nathanael's answer changes tone completely in one line. Something got past the door.

You have already been seen in the part nobody was watching. John 1 has Him naming the unwatched moment first, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that kind of seeing feel like being known rather than being caught.

And Hebrews says it plainly

There is a sentence in Hebrews that would be frightening if it were about anybody else.

Neither is there any creature that is not manifest in his sight: but all things are naked and opened unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do. (Hebrews 4:13)

Naked and opened. There is no soft way to translate it.

But read the next paragraph, which is where the writer goes immediately. He goes to a high priest who is touched with the feeling of our infirmities, and then he says come boldly.

The full exposure and the invitation to come boldly are in the same breath. That is the whole argument, and it only works because of who is doing the looking.

You are fully seen by somebody who invited you to come boldly in the same paragraph. Hebrews 4 puts the exposure and the welcome together, and it is His Spirit who keeps those two from canceling each other out.