Teaching Her the Words I Have Not Said

The girl is seven and she is kneeling up on the kitchen chair to be taller, which is how she does everything, and she has decided tonight is the night she learns the whole prayer.

Our Father, which art in heaven. She gets that far every time. Hallowed be thy name, says her grandmother, and the girl says hallowed like it is a kind of bird.

They go a line at a time. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done. In earth, as it is in heaven. The girl repeats each one with her chin up and her eyes shut too tight, and she gets give us this day our daily bread on the first go because she likes bread.

Then trespasses, and trespasses is a wall. She tries it four ways. Her grandmother says it slowly and the girl laughs at her own mouth and tries again, and gets it, and they both make a fuss.

And the grandmother is saying the next line before the girl asks for it, because she has never in her life had to reach for these words. She had them at that chair. Her own mother had them at a chair like it. She could say the whole prayer in her sleep and has, probably, on a bad night.

Which is when it comes to her, quietly, while a seven year old is wrestling with a hard word: she knows every line of this and she has not said one of them for herself in a long while. Not asking. Not out loud. Not meaning it at anybody.

She has not doubted a word of it either. Not once, not in the hospital year, not ever. It is all true. She simply lives a good way up the road from it and could not tell you when the house got that far away.

For thine is the kingdom, says the girl, triumphant, and hops down off the chair.

You are the one who knew the next line without reaching. You believe every word you have ever handed anybody. And there is a distance between what you know and where you live, and you have started to wonder what that distance says about you.

Unfeigned is Paul's word, not mine

Somebody has been letting you believe that the distance is evidence about the belief. Let me put a verse between you and that.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.2 Timothy 1:5

Paul is looking at a faith that came down a kitchen, grandmother to mother to boy, and the first thing he says about it is unfeigned. Not impressive. Not consistent. Unfeigned, which means unhypocritical, unpretended, the real article. That is his verdict on a household faith handed along like a recipe, and he does not hedge it.

You have an unfeigned faith, and the word is Paul's and not your own hopeful opinion of yourself. I am not being generous with you here; it is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that faith alight in you through years when nothing was feeding it, which is not what happens to a costume. A costume comes off. This did not come off.

So the belief is real. Hold that steady, because everything else I have to say tonight stands on it.

Both things are true and neither one indicts the other

Now the harder half, and I am going to say it without any edge in it at all.

Knowing every line is not the same as living near the One the lines are addressed to. You already know that, which is why you are reading. The mistake is not in noticing the gap. The mistake is in what you have been doing with it: using the distance to cross examine the faith, then using the faith to talk yourself out of the distance, and both of those are ways of never looking straight at it. Scripture does neither, and the Holy Spirit has never once used the one to prosecute the other.

Look straight at it. Two things are true. The belief is real, and you have been living up the road. Neither one is proof against the other. Paul writes to a young man about a faith that is unfeigned and then talks in the same letter about a spirit of fear that gets in and about stirring up what God has already put in a person, which means the New Testament has no trouble at all holding both.

You are not a fraud, and you are not fine, and both of those are yours to hold at once tonight without either one canceling the other. That is not a clever balance I have invented; His word holds them together in one letter, and the Holy Spirit does not indict a person for the honesty of that. He is the one who made you notice at the kitchen chair.

The coming near is His work

Here is where the weight comes off, and it comes off in a place most people never think to look for it.

The assumption underneath has been that the way back to living near God is a performance to get up: a routine, a discipline, a version of a person who prays properly and does not miss. And because the number of times that has been started is known exactly, the whole thing got filed away quietly under things I cannot sustain.

But look at what Paul says about the keeping of it, a few lines later in the same letter. The good thing committed to you is kept by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us. The dwelling is His. The keeping is His. Your part is not to manufacture a nearness. Your part is to open your mouth to the God who is already in the room.

You have the Holy Spirit dwelling in you as you read this, and nearness is His doing and not a standard you have to reach. That is 2 Timothy 1:14 speaking and not me talking you round, and the same Spirit who has kept the belief unfeigned through the quiet years is the one drawing you near now. You do not have to build a way to a God who lives in the house.

And that is why the smallest thing said out loud counts. Not because small is all you can manage. Because the drawing was never yours to do.