Ask...

"...and you shall receive." Again and again.

Why do I keep returning to this statement? Because over the decades I have noticed something about it, namely that it can be literally true. It is also the first clause in Matthew 7:7 —

“Ask, and it will be given to you;
seek, and you will find;
knock, and it will be opened to you.”

I am drawn to it now because of something that happened yesterday, and not for the first time. I was going about my business in the house — I work at home — and I went to fetch a couple of backup drives from my fire safe, to back up my business and personal computers. It’s something I do somewhat regularly. The critical data is backed up online, with history, but reinstalling these machines from scratch is time consuming and not much fun so I maintain recent image backups as well.

My housemate also has a fire safe, and some time ago she decided to move the key to a better location. And then she forgot where that was. And the spare key went missing too. These two fire safes, different models of the same brand, have locks that aren’t all that great. The safes are designed to protect against fire much more than theft. After all, they can be picked up and carried off, locked.

When the keys were discovered missing, I tried my key in the other safe. It didn’t work. If you have a key that is similar to the intended one, however, sometimes you can get it to work even though it isn’t an exact fit. Not this one, though.

When I went this day to open my own safe to retrieve the drives, I hesitated and decided to try my key in the other safe once more. I walked across the house, tried it, and it still didn’t work. I jiggled it the way I do (I know a few tricks), and it still didn’t work.

At that point, ready to give up again, a thought crossed my mind. “I didn’t pray about this.” You might find that a little strange, or not, but this situation was not unlike certain others in the past, and the thought made a lot of sense to me because of what had happened on those other occasions when I prayed, needing help with something simple or not so simple. And so I asked, I tried the key one last time, and it turned and the safe unlocked.

I could have easily written this off as coincidence, except for memories of those earlier occasions for which details differed but the outcome was success. At some point coincidence passes out of view, and my cumulative experiences have passed that point.

The specific memories that come to mind are of being unable to find something, or of being unable to get a particular piece of code to work after trying everything (I am a software developer), in situations where other people are going to be directly and negatively affected. The outcomes included finding objects in places I didn’t know existed, or in places I never would have imagined to look, and finding causes for software failures that I might never have guessed. Sometimes the answer just popped into my head, if not immediately then within a short time afterward.

One such situation involved a key. At an earlier church I was locking up after the Sunday morning service, the last one to leave, and I heard the organ blower in the basement still running — it’s a pipe organ — because the guest organist that morning had forgotten to shut it down. The power control is on the console, and the console was closed and locked. I had no idea where the key would be, and everyone else was gone. I looked in what seemed like likely places, such as in the church office. (I was a board member and I had the keys to the place, just not the key to the organ console.) Finally, back at the organ, I asked God about it, and then I “happened” to glance at the console up close and notice an uncovered cubbyhole to the right of the manuals. There was something in the very back of it, in the shadows. It was the key.

I couldn’t resist including a couple of photos of the organ, a Reuter, the first photo a facade view (the chambers are located behind the facade pipes) and the second from inside the left (swell) chamber¹. Leaving it running unattended was not an option.

Pipe Organ Facade and Left (Swell) Chamber

There are only so many of these occasions that I still remember, but there is a much larger picture of asking and having things “given unto me”, and I don’t believe that I am special in this regard, other than being particularly curious and questioning. Most of the time my asking has not taken the form of prayer — I would just wonder, asking questions of nobody in particular. I asked about why the world was the way it was, and what was going on with it. All kinds of things.

While I was raised in Christian faith traditions, I later avoided churches for what came to be half my life, and I came to believe in a God that had abandoned this planet to die on its own (more about my story here). I didn’t really even expect answers to my questions, and certainly not specific, detailed ones. But they came. Through books and through workshops at first. Later on, through online sources, eventually including the Internet. TV, not so much, but a little at times. I’ve not watched much TV as an adult.

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The workshops deserve special mention. I reached a very deep level of frustration in the late summer of 1981, after I had turned 31. I had all kinds of information flowing in by then, and it was contradictory, and I had no way to tell who, if anyone, was telling the truth and who was lying. I was in my first “time away” phase (from church and from God), and prayer per se would not have occurred to me, but one day I cried out — to the universe — about the situation. I asked, explicitly, how can I know who is telling the truth?

Three days later the phone rang. It was a cold sales call from an organization called Summit Workshops² (no relationship that I know of to any currently existing organization by that name) that offered "educational workshops". They called themselves an educational organization, and it was indeed that. I would much later find out that it belonged to a class of organizations known as Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGATs), having it roots at least in part in est³.

Much has been written about LGATs, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and I am not going to duplicate those efforts here. Where I found myself, however, in answer to my question, my plea, was in the midst of an organization that offered much truth mixed with a fair number of lies, and many problems. Rather than solving my problems, the answer had multiplied them!

I was now living a workshop within workshops. My task was to sort out what was going on within this organization, with which I had a love-hate relationship, in order to somehow extricate the truths that I was seeking that were taught there that no one else had taught me growing up, to reject the junk, and then to escape alive and still mentally intact. All while paying a great deal of money for the privilege, lest anyone think I was taking unfair advantage.

I proceeded to engage, first as a participant and then soon as volunteer, as workshop assistant, sound operator, camera operator, workshop logistics manager, receptionist, and phone team member (making those cold calls), among other activities. Also something called Guest Evening Leadership Training (GELT), as I recall. I did things that I dreaded doing (phone team, GELT), and at least managed to learn from it. I treated and tested the organization like I would treat and test a church today, although I had considerably more energy 40 years ago.

I eventually did escape⁴, full of new insights, some of them erroneous, and of fond memories mingled with terrible ones, and having a great deal more experience with distinguishing truth from falsehood. I was also bankrupt. Other people didn’t always fare as well. As usual, be careful what you ask for, but I do count the experience as "question answered".

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There are limits on this ‘asking’ thing. Some answers come; some don’t. They don’t come if you don’t ask, reminiscent of James 4:2c, but that’s complicated and I don’t want to go there right now. James 4:3 is less harsh and easier to understand than the preceding verse: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask amiss, that you may spend it on your pleasures.“ Selfish requests can be self-limiting, whether for information or for material gain.

When I hear aware people remarking about all the scary changes taking place in the world, and finding it incomprehensible or paradoxical, I call this understanding what is happening but not why. I suggest that an appropriate response to this situation is to ask why. Answers are available, for the asking. I have offered above a very simple example, and another complex one, just two of many that I have experienced. And I know I am not alone.

It is possible if not likely that everyone has received these kinds of answers. What I know with certainty is that during my “time away” I experienced miraculous accommodations that I did not acknowledge because they did not fit into my worldview at the time. I puzzled over them and moved on. I would guess that I am not alone in this, and that not all answers are acknowledged.

We are not alone, although I cannot convince anyone else of that. The answers come from somewhere. This is something we each need to experience. We are, by nature, trouble. We cannot, individually or collectively, manage life on our own, and the harder we try, the worse things become. Somehow, this is not obvious to us.

We need help, help that is available for the asking, if we will but acknowledge the problem, seek resolution not through our own efforts but through God’s working with and in us, and commit to a different way of life that leads to the kind of outcome that most of us would desire.

It is at once simple and difficult. Simple because there isn’t that much to do to start out. Difficult, because of the corrupted world we live in and our proclivity for trying to solve on our own the problems that this world presents.

It is also difficult because we have our established ways of doing things, and the way out of this mess is quite different and foreign. Which is why

Matthew 7:7   “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”

is followed by

Matthew 7:13-14   “Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.”

Take heed if you will.

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Related:

• Such Foolishness

• Passion

• Testimony

1. The far end of this chamber contains a huge number of small pipes. The swell shutters (controlling loudness) are located to the right, not visible here. I climbed up and took this shot myself. I was never able to complete the higher climb to the other (right) chamber.

2. The Summit Organization, previously called Summit Workshops, Inc., founded by Paul Larson. The company eventually failed and I have received more than one version as to why, with no way to be sure. But it failed. The founder started another one and then died.

3. Werner Erhard’s Erhard Standard (or Seminars) Training known as est.

4. More accurately, I left twice, but the second time was the “escape”. The first departure was brought on by my father’s sudden death from a heart attack, and I returned to the organization a year or so later. Strangely, in the first stent, one of the things they had had me do was call my father and invite him to do a workshop. For those of you familiar with LGATs this ought to be an eye-roller, but while he didn’t sign up, we renewed our relationship and I was able to visit him one last time a few months before his death, not knowing what was coming.