Eleven Years Of The Same Question

Eleven years is long enough that you have stopped being able to see it.

You have asked this family to come out with you for over a decade. Not constantly. Not naggingly. Just regularly, in the ordinary way somebody offers a thing, and mostly the answer has been a version of no.

And now there are two words available for what you have been doing, and they sit on either side of the same behavior.

One of them is faithful. The other one is foolish.

And you cannot tell which one applies, and there is nobody you can ask, because asking somebody would require explaining the whole eleven years, and you would hear yourself say it out loud, and you are not sure you could stand that.

So let me be the one who says something about it, and let me start by saying that the confusion is honest and it is not weakness.

He stayed yet other seven days

There is a detail in the flood account that almost never gets preached and is one of the quietest things in Genesis.

And he stayed yet other seven days; and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark; And the dove came in to him in the evening; and, lo, in her mouth was an olive leaf pluckt off. (Genesis 8:10-11, King James Version)

He stayed yet other seven days. And again he sent forth the dove.

Read what has already happened before that verse. He sent the dove once, and it found nothing, and it came back to him because there was nowhere to put its foot. That is a failed attempt, plainly recorded.

And what he does about it is wait a week and send it again.

You are doing something that is written into the record as ordinary, and it was never treated as foolishness by anybody in that account. Genesis 8:10 has a man repeat a thing that had already failed once, with no explanation offered and no embarrassment attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as company rather than as instruction.

And notice the shape of it. He does not send the dove out every hour. He waits seven days. There is a rhythm to it, unhurried, and the waiting is as much a part of it as the sending.

You have been keeping a rhythm rather than making a nuisance of yourself, and it was never frequency that made anybody a burden. The written word puts a week between the attempts and treats that as wisdom rather than as giving up, and the Spirit of God is what lets an older woman see her own eleven years in that shape.

The two words are not opposites

Now let me deal with faithful and foolish, because I do not think they are the pair they have been treated as.

Foolish would be asking without ever noticing the answer. Asking in a way that costs them something. Asking with a hook in it, so that a no has to be paid for.

That is not what has been happening in your family for eleven years. What has been happening is an offer, repeated at a reasonable interval, from somebody who has never once made anybody pay for declining it.

There is a word for that and it is not foolish. Asking again after a long silence is not foolishness, and the dove went out of that window more than once.

You are not the foolish one in this account, and it was never the repetition that would have made you that. Genesis 8 distinguishes patient repetition from anything desperate by putting a week between the attempts, which is exactly why the Spirit of God will not let an unhurried offer be renamed as pestering.

And here is the thing about the eleven years that I suspect nobody has said. Your family knows the invitation exists. They have known it for a decade. That is not nothing. There are people in that household who could not tell you a single thing that has been reliably true about their week for eleven years, and this is one.

Ask once more, and go anyway

Here is the practical part and it is small enough to be disappointing.

Ask once more this week, in ordinary words, at the ordinary interval. Nothing different. No speech about how long it has been.

You are able to make the twelfth year look exactly like the first eleven, and it has never once needed to escalate to still be an invitation. The passage sends the same dove out of the same window in the same way, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman doing an ordinary thing for the four hundredth time.

Then go out for twenty minutes, whatever the answer is. That part is not a consolation prize and it is not a protest. It is that the walk was always worth something on its own, and eleven years of attaching it to their answer has quietly made you dependent on people who do not know they are being depended on.

And keep the interval. Do not ask twice this week because you read something. The week between is the part that has kept this clean for eleven years.

You are keeping something clean that could easily have gone sour, and it was never automatic that a decade of no would leave a person still asking kindly. Genesis 8:10 puts a rhythm around the repeating, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present in an ordinary sentence said at an ordinary interval.