The Mountain Or The City

They sat on the wall above the town for about forty minutes and Farrah did not get the answer she had come for, and it took her most of a year to be glad about it.

She had brought the question up on purpose. She had waited for the right moment and then engineered it, in the way you do when you have been carrying something.

Delphine is about seventy and has been in it a long time and everybody in that town takes their hard questions to her, and Farrah's hard question was the oldest live argument in her family, the one that has separated a set of relatives from another set of relatives since before she was born.

She put it to her properly. She set out both sides. She did it fairly, and she was honest that she had a lean, and she said at the end of it: "I just want somebody to tell me which one is right."

Delphine looked at the town for a bit.

And then she said, "Are you honoring God this week?"

Farrah said that was not the question.

Delphine said, "No, it is not."

And they sat there.

Farrah said afterwards that she was genuinely annoyed for about two days, and that she went home and told her husband that Delphine had dodged it, which is a fair description of what it looked like at the time.

What changed her mind was noticing, over the following months, that she had been waiting.

Not waiting for Delphine. Waiting generally. Waiting for a ruling, from somebody, about that argument, before she felt entitled to get on with anything. And she could date the waiting back about eleven years, to a specific Christmas, and she had never once described it to herself in those terms.

She said: "I thought I was being careful. I was being stationary."

You may be waiting too. For somebody with standing to settle it, so that you can begin. And the wait feels responsible and it feels like integrity, and from inside it is almost impossible to distinguish from being stuck. And nobody has ever shown you what happened when this exact kind of question was put to Jesus.

He Was Handed The Great Live Dispute And Went Past It

There is a conversation at a well where a woman puts the biggest and most divisive religious question of her time and place directly to Jesus.

It was not a distraction and it was not a trick, whatever people say about it. It was a genuine, long running, painful division about where God is properly worshipped, and it had separated her people from His people for centuries.

Our fathers worshipped in this mountain, she says, and you say that Jerusalem is the place.

Here is what He does with it.

"But the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth: for the Father seeketh such to worship him."John 4:23

He does not rule on the mountain. He does not adjudicate between the two locations in the terms she offered.

He moves the ground the whole question was standing on, and He does it in a way that leaves both sides holding something and neither side holding a verdict.

You have been waiting for a ruling in terms He did not use. John 4 has the great live dispute handed over and answered by relocating rather than by deciding, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and sits it on a wall above a town at golden hour.

And notice the phrase that follows. The Father seeketh such to worship Him. The sentence turns immediately from where to who, and it puts God in the position of the one looking rather than the one arbitrating.

You are being sought rather than assessed while the question stands open. That is what the written word does when it is handed the biggest version of this, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that land in somebody who has been stationary for eleven years.

This Site Is Not Going To Rule Either

Now be plain, because a page about a question not being settled which quietly settles it would be worse than useless.

This site does not rule on the argument in your family, and it does not rule on the one this whole domain sits next to. It does not lean, it is not withholding a position as a technique, and it does not consider either group of your relatives to be the problem.

You keep your lean. Nothing here is trying to move it. If you came here for something to bring to the next family occasion, this is the wrong site, and that is not a criticism.

You can worship God today with every bit of that unresolved. It is written that the hour is come and now is, which is a present tense that does not wait on anybody's conclusion, and His Spirit is the one who has been with you through eleven years of waiting for somebody to say the word.

And say the guard. Nothing here asks you for anything. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no side, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included. You are as fully His with the whole argument standing exactly where it stands, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from being a verdict in a soft voice.