WHAT IS IT?

Trusting God Before You Know the Outcome

WHAT IS IT?

Exodus 16:14-15 describes the morning it first appeared. The dew lifted off the ground, and in its place was something nobody had a name for. Scripture puts it this way: “And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat.”

They looked at it lying there and asked the only honest question a person can ask about something they don’t understand. What is it. That question is the reason we have a word for it at all. Manna doesn’t mean bread from heaven. It means the question itself. They named it after not knowing.

I think about the asking more than I think about the eating. The eating was daily. The asking was daily. Neither one came with a supply that carried over. Gather twice what you needed and store the rest for next week and it rotted by morning. I used to think that was the hard part of the story. I lived inside it myself and understood it was the mercy. God wasn’t withholding the answer. He was keeping me coming back to ask for it.

I stopped praying for a five-year plan a long time ago. What I pray now is smaller. God, what is it. What is your will for me today. Not the year. Not the decade. The ground in front of me, and whatever thin and flaking thing is sitting on it that I haven’t learned the name of yet.

THE TIDE GOES OUT

The first thing He said to me was get rid of everything that looks like your old life.

I understood the instruction before I understood its cost. Obey first. Feel the weight later. I got rid of what I could see. The obvious things. The things anyone standing outside my life could point at and say, get rid of that. I did. I thought that was the whole assignment.

It wasn’t. Once the obvious things were gone, other things started surfacing that I hadn’t known were there. A tide goes out and it doesn’t just take the water with it. It shows you the wreckage that was sitting on the bottom the whole time, invisible only because there had been enough water covering it to look like floor. That was the real work. It didn’t happen in a weekend. It was a season. Long stretches of repentance that felt more like surgery than relief. Forgiveness I had to choose again on mornings when I hadn’t finished choosing it the day before. Amends that cost me pride I didn’t know I still had. Denying myself in ways nobody saw and nobody applauded, because that isn’t what denial is for. Putting to death, Paul calls it. Something in you has to die for something else to stand up in its place.

Some of what surfaced wasn’t new. It was old fear, the same fear I’d already stood in front of and named once before, the kind God had already started peeling back layer by layer, long before this season began. This wasn’t a new work starting over. It was the same work, further in.

That was still the manna. That was still what is it, asked over and over, in rooms nobody else was in.

THE YES BEFORE THE KNOCK

Somewhere inside that season, I said yes to something I couldn’t see the shape of yet. I didn’t say yes to a plan. I said yes to whatever He asked, before He finished asking it.

Abraham didn’t get an itinerary. He got a voice and a command to go. Scripture doesn’t soften how little detail he had. He went out, not knowing where he was going. That’s a man who decided the going mattered more than the knowing.

I made that same decision without fully understanding what I was agreeing to. I yielded myself in advance to whatever His purpose turned out to be, however it looked, whatever it cost. I thought that yes was supposed to make me steady. I thought if I had already agreed to whatever was coming, then whatever came wouldn’t be able to touch the part of me that already said yes to it.

That is not what happened.

WHAT THE BODY REMEMBERS

Mine closed out around a window. It started as a welfare check, and somewhere in what followed, they shot at me through my own glass. That’s the part I remember, the shooting itself. Everything else that happened that night I don’t have in order. I know it because I carried it in my body for years afterward. Black and blue ribs. Bruising down both arms. A flinch at the sight of a uniform with nothing behind it, no memory attached, just the reaction. A paralysis I couldn’t explain to anyone, including myself, because I didn’t have the story that was supposed to go with it. I only had the location where it hurt.

I didn’t understand what I was carrying until the police reports came back and laid it out on paper in front of me, and reading those pages didn’t put the wound there. It gave what I’d already been carrying a name. The body keeps what the mind doesn’t.

Understanding isn’t in competition with trust. The reports didn’t replace what God was doing in me. They served it. Having the name didn’t make me trust Him less. It made the trusting more honest.

I OPENED THE DOOR

I was on probation by the time the knock came. Probation teaches a man to walk through his own house like he’s still being watched, and after long enough, the watching stops feeling like something outside you. It becomes something you carry in your own chest whether anyone is actually looking or not.

The knock was heavy. Slow. Not frantic, not soft. It froze my gut before my mind caught up to what my body was already doing. I thought probation. I thought police. I thought some glitch in the system coming back to collect what little I had rebuilt. None of that was rational. All of it was instant. The yes I had already given didn’t erase any of it. I answered that door shaking. Not after the shaking passed. Through it.

Israel didn’t wait for the water to part and then walk through on dry ground with their nerves settled. They stepped, and the ground showed up under the stepping. Read it slow and the order matters. The walking comes first. The parting comes with it, not before it. Nobody in that story gets calm before the obedience. The obedience is the whole obedience precisely because the calm hasn’t arrived yet.

I opened the door.

Somewhere in that same season, I had come to a place where I stopped trying to control what I couldn’t control. I stopped bracing for what might show up next. I made a decision that turned into a kind of motto. When it comes to my door, I’ll deal with it then.

A man hit a cat right in front of my house. He came to my door weeping, holding the animal wrapped in a towel. One eye bulging, the other hanging by the optic nerve. I couldn’t have told you in that moment which of them was worse off, the animal or the man holding it.

He wasn’t really weeping over the cat. He was looking at that dying, broken thing in his hands and seeing his own life in it. He told me everything. Addiction. HIV. Cancer. Chemo that had rotted his teeth. Years of abuse. Medication he had stopped taking. A body with nothing left on it. My conscience is my god, he told me. He didn’t want prayer. He didn’t want answers.

I gave him pieces of my own story back. Things I hadn’t told most people in my life. It was the only honest currency I had in that moment, and God used it. I hadn’t known I had that in me to give until I was standing there giving it.

He walked away still carrying what he had walked up with. I don’t know what happened to him after that. I don’t know if he’s alive. I don’t know if anything I said changed anything at all. That’s one of the strangest parts of this whole story. I showed up. I gave what I had. I never found out the outcome, and I never will.

It would be easy to tell this as proof that I had arrived somewhere. Healed enough, steady enough, finished enough to be handed someone else’s collapse. That isn’t what it was. I was still shaking from a knock that had nothing to do with him. I wasn’t the arrived version of anything.

I was available. That’s a smaller word than arrived, and it’s the truer one. James says faith without works is dead. It has to take a shape somebody else can see, or it isn’t finished being faith yet. Mine took the shape of standing in a doorway with a stranger’s grief in front of me, giving him what I had, and never learning what became of it.

THE SAME CHAPTER

Hebrews 11 opens with the definition everyone knows. Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Then the chapter does something most people don’t stay long enough to see. It runs through name after name. By faith Abraham obeyed and went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith Moses refused the treasures of Egypt and chose affliction with the people of God instead. By faith Israel passed through the Red Sea as on dry land. Through faith, the chapter says, they subdued kingdoms, stopped the mouths of lions, escaped the edge of the sword, and out of weakness were made strong.

Read that far and it sounds like exactly the theology I’ve spent this whole essay trying to correct. Believe hard enough and watch the kingdoms fall.

Then the same chapter turns, without warning, and it doesn’t lower its voice to do it. Others were tortured. Others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, of bonds and imprisonment. They were stoned. They were sawn asunder. They were slain with the sword. They wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, afflicted, tormented. Of whom the world was not worthy.

Same chapter. Same word, faith, used for both. No ranking between them.

The faith wasn’t validated by the outcome.

Paul knew that math before he ever wrote it down for anyone else. He had the pedigree, the credentials, everything a man could point to as gain, and he counted all of it loss for the sake of knowing Christ. The substance was never the kingdom or the sword. The substance was the knowing.

TODAY’S PORTION

Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. I used to read that verse like a formula for getting what I was hoping for. Belief as currency, outcome as the purchase. It isn’t that. The substance isn’t the thing you obtain. It’s the trust itself, carried daily, sometimes carried by the second, in the middle of not knowing whether this particular step lands on dry ground or in the flood.

That’s what the manna was teaching, before I had a category for any of it. Not what will you give me. What is it. Asked fresh, every morning, because yesterday’s answer doesn’t keep, and neither does yesterday’s courage, and neither does yesterday’s understanding of what your own body is still carrying. You gather today’s portion and you eat it and tomorrow you ask again. Somewhere in that repetition, the asking becomes the relationship instead of the obstacle standing in front of it.

Paul says faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God, and most people quote that line like it’s describing something that already happened to them, back at the beginning, the day they first heard and believed. That’s not how the sentence is built. The hearing that produces faith isn’t a memory you go back to. It’s still happening, or it isn’t. Nobody gets handed faith once and keeps it in a drawer. It’s fed the same way it got started, and when the hearing stops, the substance doesn’t stay where it was left.

That’s the same shape as the manna. You don’t gather it once and live off the gathering. You go back for it, every day, and the going back isn’t a lesser kind of faith than the day you first believed. It’s the same kind, still being formed.

You have a name on that same list, whether you’ve read it that way or not. You don’t get to choose in advance whether your chapter reads like a kingdom subdued or like a sword. All they had was the asking, and the going, before the outcome was visible. That’s the only part of the equation that was ever yours to bring.

I don’t know what’s on the other side of my own sentence in that list yet. I opened a door shaking, and stepped into water I didn’t watch part first, and asked the question again this morning the same as every morning before it.

What is it.

Whatever it is, take today’s portion, and ask again tomorrow.