To Whom Shall We Go

She has got further than anybody knows and the furthest was a Tuesday in October.

Nobody in her life is aware of this. She was at church three days later and she was fine, and she led the thing she leads, and two people said afterward that it had been helpful.

On the Tuesday she had sat in her own front room and worked out, quite calmly, how it would actually go. Which conversations she would have to have and roughly in what order. What she would say to her mother. That there would be about four months of people being concerned and then it would settle.

She was not distraught while she did this. That is the part she keeps returning to. She was doing arithmetic, the way you do when you are considering a move.

It is one thing. She is not going to explain what and it does not matter. It is one specific unanswered thing that has been unanswered for a long time and that she cannot get round or under, and everything else she believes is intact, and the one thing has become load bearing without her ever agreeing to that.

If your hand has been on a door, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to talk you out of anything.

A crowd left, and He let them, and He asked the rest

Here is a scene that ought to be better known by anybody in her position, and the useful thing is how it is handled.

Jesus has said something difficult. Not gently difficult, genuinely hard, about eating His flesh, and the crowd that had been following Him around does the thing crowds do.

From that time many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.

Many. Disciples, not opponents. People who had been following.

And He does not go after them. There is no chase, no clarification, no softening of what He said. He turns to the twelve and asks a question that would be almost unbearable from anybody else: Will ye also go away?

And Peter answers.

Then Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? thou hast the words of eternal life.John 6:68

Now look at what that answer is not.

It is not enthusiasm. It is not a testimony about how good he feels. It is not: because You have never let us down, or because everything makes sense to us, or because our hearts are burning.

It is a question, answered with a fact. To whom shall we go. There is nowhere. And then the reason, which is not about his experience at all: thou hast the words of eternal life.

That is a man staying without a good feeling, on the strength of a fact about who is standing in front of him.

You are permitted to stay for the reason Peter gave rather than for a better one, and it was already enough that night. John 6:68 is where that sits, in an answer given in a crowd that had just emptied out, and the same Spirit who kept the whole embarrassing scene in the record is the one who reaches a woman doing arithmetic in a front room.

He asked the question out loud

Now the other half, which is about what Jesus did rather than what Peter said.

He asked them. Out loud. Will ye also go away?

He did not pretend the option was not there. He did not assume their loyalty and He did not manage the moment. He put the door in the middle of the room and named it, and then waited for an answer.

Which means that on a Tuesday in October, a woman working out the order of the conversations was not doing something unthinkable. She was inside a question Jesus Himself has asked out loud, in front of witnesses, to people He had chosen.

And notice: the twelve were not scolded for being in a position where the question could be asked. The question is only asked of people who could go.

You have been standing somewhere Jesus Himself has named, and it was already a place He speaks into rather than around. He promised it, in the way He handled the emptying room without chasing anybody or softening a word (John 6:67), and His Spirit does not treat a person near the door as somebody to be managed.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing on this site is a lever. Nothing here suggests that any practice would have got you an answer on the one thing, or that a different approach now would. There is no mechanism on this page.

And I am not going to close the question for you. The thing is still unanswered, and it is still yours, and nothing here pretends it has been resolved or tells you it does not matter.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You are fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's certainty.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.