Public speaking and a lifetime of Sunday Morning sermons have taught me one thing: (unlike the summation I am about to give,) life cannot be summed up in twenty minutes or three points. I say this to fifteen girls sitting girls sprawled around our living room last week just before I begin to talk about the Sayable and the Said. I say it to them because I am a cheat and a scoundrel--hording ideas on scraps of paper, scrawling words in the margins of my Bible to pull out at opportune times. I copy the methods I learn for good speaking, good learning, and good works and spew them on Tuesday nights or whenever questions need to be answered.

Which is always, I'm finding.

She stands in my kitchen today as we cook salmon and smell cilantro. She says: I'm trying to figure out how God can be the God Who is There and Who Cares, and still be the God who lets soldiers die and divorce rip and cancer steal life. I make a mental list of all the suffering I see, the suffering that touches the people I love, and silently agree. How can He be both? This is a question that three point sermons can't answer.

We suspend on hope, on ifs and on If God Wills. Emily Dickinson said it this way: I dwell in possibility. And the father of the demoniac in Mark 9 said it this way: If You can do anything, do it! Help us! This is when only the Sayable can answer.

I mean to say that sometimes the answers to the questions we trip on and swirl under are not found in knowing the answers at all. Sometimes the answers are in the saying of truth and that is all.

There are no ifs in following Christ, Jesus said to that father. Because we believe and because God doesn't need our help anyway, the only thing that needs help is our unbelief. So we pray like this: I believe. Help my unbelief. A statement and a question. A statement and an exclamation. A question and a statement. It depends on your punctuation. It depends on your prayer. But pray it anyway. Ask it anyway. Any way.

Because we believe in this man who was God and flesh simultaneously. We believe in a perfect garden and we believe in death and resurrection. We believe that sufferings aren't for sins sake, but Glory's. We believe that lost coins and sheep are worth it and we believe most of all that sometimes we don't believe. So we say that, too, right out loud.

Then we see the miracle, small and hushed, quiet and unassuming, slipping in unannounced because the best miracles do. And we wake one morning and find that we believe and that we really do.