Nobody Has Ever Asked Her A Second Question

She has a first answer and it is very good.

It is warm and it is short and it has a small joke in it that lands about eight times out of ten, and it covers how she is, how work is, and how the family is, in about fourteen seconds.

She has been giving it for years.

And here is the thing she noticed in March, at a wedding of all places, standing near a window with a drink she was not drinking.

Nobody ever asks the second one.

They ask how she is. She gives the answer. They say something warm back and then the conversation moves, naturally and pleasantly, onto them or onto the room or onto whatever is happening, and everybody enjoys it and nothing is wrong.

She started counting after that. Not obsessively. Just noticing, over about five months, and in five months she can identify two occasions on which somebody asked a genuine follow up.

Two. And one of those was a woman she had just met.

So a suspicion has formed, and it has now hardened into something closer to a conclusion, and it is this: the first answer is what people want. Not because they are cold. Because it is complete, and it is pleasant, and it releases everybody, and asking a second question would take the conversation somewhere neither party has time for.

She built that answer. She made it good. She made it good precisely so that people would not have to worry about her, and it has worked perfectly for about eleven years, and now it is a wall she built herself and cannot see over.

And she is thirty-nine, and there is a great deal on the other side of that fourteen seconds, and none of it has ever been out of the house.

And you have a first answer. You know exactly how it goes. And you have started to suspect that it is the whole of what anybody has ever wanted from you.

He was told something he had never said

There is a short exchange at the start of John that is easy to read past and is one of the most personal moments in the Gospels.

A man is brought to Jesus, skeptical, and Jesus says something about him before he has said a word. The man asks, reasonably, how do you know me.

Jesus answered him, "Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you."John 1:48

We are never told what happened under the fig tree.

That is the point. It is not explained to us and it never was, because the whole force of it is that it was between two people, one of whom was on his own under a tree and thought he was unobserved.

Whatever it was, it was the thing behind his first answer, and it was known without being asked.

You are already known past your first answer, and it did not require a second question. It is written, before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you (John 1:48), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a present reality rather than a story about somebody's remarkable insight two thousand years ago.

Now the wall, because you built it and that matters.

You made the first answer good on purpose. You made it warm and short and funny so that nobody would have to worry about you, and that came out of genuine consideration for other people and it is not a character defect.

But a wall built for kindness is still a wall, and eleven years of maintaining it has made it very smooth, and the smoother it is the less likely anybody is to try to look over it. Nobody asks a second question when the first answer sounds finished.

You are permitted to give a slightly worse first answer, and the flaw in it is the handhold somebody needs. Scripture says confess your sins to one another and pray for one another (James 5:16), which describes a kind of speech most people never get anywhere near, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to say a thing that is not tidy.

And the two occasions in five months, and the fact that one was a stranger.

That is worth noticing rather than resenting. A stranger asks a second question because they have no map of you yet, and the people who know you have a map, and a map means they already believe they know the answer.

They are not uninterested. They are operating on old information, mostly information you gave them, and nobody updates a map they have no reason to doubt.

You are not being ignored, you are being read from a file that you wrote. It is written that man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who has been reading the part that never went into the file.

And what is on the other side of fourteen seconds.

You said there is a great deal, and that none of it has ever been out of the house, and you are thirty-nine.

That is a long time for a person to carry the whole interior of their own life without a single occasion of saying it out loud to anybody, and it is worth naming that plainly rather than treating it as normal, because it has become normal and it is not.

You have an interior life that has never been said out loud and it is not too much for anybody who actually asks. It is written that You know when I sit down and when I rise up, You discern my thoughts from afar (Psalm 139:2), and it is His Spirit who has been discerning across every one of those eleven years while the first answer did its work at the door.