He Does Not Know What He Wants

Karim is forty-one and last month, for the first time, the money in his account at the end of the month was his.

The details of the arrangement before that are not this article's business. It ran from when he was twenty-two. There was always a reason and there was always an accounting and the reasons were mostly family reasons, and it ended in March in a way that was not quiet, and he is out.

His friend from work, who knows a little of it, took him for food to mark the month and said, "So what are you going to do? What do you actually want?"

And Karim said, "I want to get the car looked at."

And his friend laughed, because he thought it was a joke.

It was not a joke. It was the only thing Karim could produce.

Here is what has happened since, and this is the part that matters.

He has been trying to answer the question in his own head, on his own, at night, for six weeks. He sits with it the way you sit with a crossword. What do I want. And nothing comes. Not a small thing, not a big thing, not a shape, not a direction.

He has money. He has time. He has, for the first time in nineteen years, permission.

And he has looked at that question for six weeks and produced one car service.

Here is the evening it caught.

His mother, who does not know the half of it, asked him at the table what he was going to do with himself now.

And Karim said, "I am fine, Mama."

And she said, "That is not what I asked."

And she is seventy-three and she went back to her tea and let it go, and Karim sat there and understood that two people in six weeks had asked him the same question and he had given both of them nothing.

You know that. Something ended, and the space opened, and everybody wants to know what you are going to do with it, and the honest answer is that there is nothing in the drawer where the wanting is supposed to be.

Brought out in order to be brought in

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you what to want. That would be absurd and it would be one more person deciding things about your life. I am not going to give you a verdict on your family and I am not going to tell you what God is preparing, because I do not know and inventing it would be cheap.

What I will do is read you one sentence from a father explaining the whole thing to a child.

Deuteronomy 6 sets up a scene: a son asks what all this is about, and the father is told what to answer. And the answer is this:

And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers.Deuteronomy 6:23

That he might bring us in.

That is a purpose clause. It is the grammar of intention. The bringing out is not a self-contained event with its own meaning; the sentence makes it the first half of something, and the second half is the point of the first.

You were brought out for a reason that has a second half in it, and the second half is stated as the purpose rather than as a possibility. Deuteronomy 6:23 uses the language of intention and not of hope, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen where a man cannot answer a question.

Now notice who is doing everything in that sentence. He brought. He might bring. He sware. There are three verbs and God is the subject of all three, and the people are the object of all three.

The son asking the question is not told what his people wanted. He is told what God intended.

You have never been asked to supply the intention, and the whole answer given to that child is about somebody else's purpose. It is written that He brought them out that He might bring them in, and the Holy Spirit is what takes the manufacturing of a future out of a person's hands.

The drawer is empty because it was never used

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Somebody would tell Karim to dream bigger. To make a list. To ask himself what he would do if he could not fail. And every one of those instructions assumes a faculty that has been out of service since he was twenty-two.

He is not failing to dream. He is trying to use a muscle nobody ever asked him to use.

For nineteen years, wanting something was not a useful activity. In that arrangement, wanting a thing was the first step toward being disappointed about it or having to justify it, and a sensible man stops doing an activity with those returns. So he stopped. It was not a defeat. It was an adaptation, and it worked.

You are not looking at a fault in yourself, and what is missing was never developed rather than lost. Psalm 37:4 has God giving the desires of the heart as something He does rather than something a person is graded on producing, and the Holy Spirit is what builds a faculty at the speed it actually builds.

And here is the specific thing I want to take off you. The question what do you want is, for a man in your position, a very large question badly aimed. Nobody could answer it. It is like being handed a blank sheet and told to write a book.

The car service was not a failure of imagination. It was the only honest answer available, and it was a real one.

You gave a true answer when you said the car, and Scripture never once treats a small true thing as beneath the notice of God. Matthew 10:30 has the hairs of a head numbered, which is a statement about the scale of things He attends to, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a small answer from being read as an empty one.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the six weeks have gone somewhere heavier than blank, or if the nights with that question have taken you somewhere dark, do not sit with it alone. Tell somebody this week. Your friend from work, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your family. That is me refusing to leave you at that table by yourself.