I Deleted What I Typed

You typed it and then you deleted it.

Three times now, and the deleting has become almost as automatic as the typing, and the whole sequence takes about eleven seconds and leaves nothing behind.

And the question itself is the most ordinary question in the world. It is the kind of thing a person types a dozen times a day about recipes and directions and how to spell something, without noticing they are doing it.

But this one has a different weight on it, and the weight is not in the question. It is in what the question seems to reveal.

Because typing it is a small act of putting something on a record. There is a phone, and a history, and somewhere a list of things a woman asked, and somewhere in that list would be this, and the list would then have it in it.

And who reads that list? Nobody. That is the answer and it is worth having early. There is no reader. There is no assessor. There is a search box and an answer and no audience whatever.

You are a woman with a question and not a woman with something to hide, and a basic question typed into a phone has never once been a disclosure about the person typing it.

Thou hast searched me, and known me

There is a psalm that begins with the only reading of a person that actually counts.

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. (Psalm 139:1, King James Version)

Thou hast searched me.

Past tense, completed. The searching has already happened. It is not a thing that might occur if a person makes a mistake, and it is not a process that gets triggered by a revealing question.

It is finished. The complete inventory of what this woman knows and does not know was taken long before any phone existed.

You have been fully searched already by the one whose reading matters, and a gap in what you know has never once been news to the God the psalm describes. The Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody deleting a question for the third time, and Psalm 139:1 puts the searching in the completed past.

And then: and known me.

Known. Not assessed, not rated, not compared with the other people on the street. Known, which is the warmest verb available and the one used about people you love.

The psalm does not say thou hast searched me and found me wanting. It says searched and known, and it says it as the opening line of a psalm that goes on to be one of the most affectionate in the book.

You are known rather than assessed, and a complete search of a person has never once produced a verdict in that psalm. The written word pairs the searching with the knowing rather than with a judgment, and the Spirit of God is the one who holds those two together in a kitchen at ten at night.

And here is what that does to the search box.

If the complete reading is already done, and it came out as knowing rather than as a verdict, then a search history is a very small document indeed. It has no reader, it is not the record that matters, and the record that does matter was closed a long time ago and came out warmly.

You are keeping a document that nobody reads while the real one is already finished, and a list of typed questions has never once been the account of a woman that anybody was consulting. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes a phone a small thing again, and Psalm 139:1 completes the searching before anything else happens.

What the deleting costs

Something practical, and it is about what happens in the eleven seconds.

Each time the question gets typed and deleted, something gets confirmed. Not to anybody else. To you. The deletion says: that was a question I should not have asked, and the saying of it makes the next attempt slightly harder.

Three deletions is three small pieces of evidence, manufactured at home, entered into an account nobody else is keeping.

You have been generating your own evidence against yourself, and a question deleted three times has never once been three pieces of proof about anything. The written word already completed the search and came out with knowing, and the Spirit of God is the one who stops an account nobody else has opened.

And there is a second cost, and it is simply the answer.

The answer is four minutes away. It has been four minutes away for eleven days. Whatever the thing is, somebody has written a clear explanation of it, and the explanation is short and probably has pictures.

Eleven days of not knowing, purchased with eleven seconds of deleting, three times.

You are four minutes from an answer you have been eleven days without, and a question that goes unasked has never once been a question that answered itself in the meantime. The Holy Spirit is the one present while a woman finally presses go, and Psalm 139:1 has the searching done and the knowing settled.

So type it tonight and press it. And then, and this is the second half, read for five minutes rather than one.

The first result will answer the question. The five minutes is what turns an answer into an understanding, and an understanding is the thing that means this particular question never has to be asked again.