Six Questions at a Wedding

He counted them afterward in the car, which he does not recommend as a way to end an evening.

Six. In about fifty minutes, between the meal and the cake, six different people had asked Idris where he stood on something.

None of them were being hostile. That is the part he keeps having to say to himself. It was a good wedding and he liked most of the people at that table and two of them are family he only sees at things like this.

But the questions came, one after another, the way they do.

What his church thinks about a particular practice. Whether he holds a certain view about the end of things. Which side he came down on in a matter that split a group in the next town four years ago. What he makes of a book somebody has been reading. Whether he agrees with a man whose name Idris only half recognized. And one more, from a cousin, delivered kindly, about something Idris had not known was a question anybody had.

He could give a straight, honest answer to two of them.

Two out of six.

The other four he handled the way you handle a plate that is too hot. He moved them along. He said something true but sideways. He asked a question back, which works about eighty percent of the time and worked all four.

And in the car he understood that he had spent an entire evening being audited on positions he had never signed up to hold, by people who were not auditing him, in a tradition whose whole original point was that you did not have to.

He is thirty-eight. He has been in that community his whole life.

And the thing that arrived at the traffic lights, and has not left since, is not embarrassment about the four. It is a much older and quieter worry, which is that he no longer knows what the floor is. If somebody stopped him in the street and gave him five words, he is not sure what he would put in them.

And you may have your own reception. Yours may not be a wedding. It may be a staff room, or a group message, or a fortnightly meeting where somebody always finds out what you think about something.

He decided in advance what he was going to know

Let me take something off you before anything else, because you have been carrying it since that car and it was never yours.

You are not obliged to hold a position on everything in order to hold the first thing. You never were. Scripture shows a man deliberately narrowing what he would carry into a room, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the breadth of your file, who makes anything land in anybody. Set it down here. It is heavy and it has been in the passenger seat since the wedding.

Now hear the sentence, and hear that it is a decision and not a limitation.

For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.1 Corinthians 2:2

I resolved.

That is not a man confessing that he had run out of material. This is the most equipped person in the room writing to the most argumentative church in the New Testament, a church that was busy sorting itself into factions by teacher, and what he tells them is that he came in having decided in advance to know one thing.

He had the other things. He uses them elsewhere at length. He chose, on purpose, what the floor would be.

And that floor is under you already. Right now, at a table with six questions coming, in a family you have belonged to your whole life. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who set you on it, and He did not make it conditional on your having a view about the rest.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side of the road and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says the other six questions are silly or that thinking carefully about them is a waste. They are not silly. People have given their lives to some of them, and there is real substance in several, and a man who says he only cares about the simple thing and then never thinks about anything is not deep, he is just quiet.

The furniture is real furniture. It is useful and you sit on it and some of it your grandmother chose.

It is simply not the floor. Scripture puts the floor under the furniture, and His Spirit is the one who holds the room up, and the difference between the two is the whole of this message.

Here is the tender part. What frightened you at the lights was not the four you dodged.

It was that you could not immediately produce the one you did not dodge. Thirty-eight years in, you know a great deal about the house and you had to think for a second about the floor, and you are honest enough not to like that. Scripture does not scold a man for that, and His Spirit is not standing over you about it either.