Eleven Years of Telling Children

You have the good version of the story about the lost sheep. Not the one in the book with the pictures; yours, worked out over about four years, with the bit at the end that always goes quiet.

You have a way of explaining being forgiven to a seven year old that works, and you know it works, because you have watched it land in about two hundred faces.

Eleven years of Sundays. Two hundred children, give or take. Several of them are adults now and one of them wrote to you.

And you cannot say the word You to Him.

Not cannot in the sense of being forbidden. You have tried. You sit down and something arrives that is a sentence about Him, or a sentence for somebody else about Him, and the second person will not come, and after a bit you get up and put the kettle on.

You could tell a child in one minute that God loves them, in words they would remember at thirty.

You have never once said out loud, addressed to Him, that He loves you.

That is the shape of eleven years, and you noticed it properly in about March, and you have not told anybody because there is no way to say it that does not sound like a crisis, and it is not a crisis. You have not lost anything. You believe all of it.

It is simply that you have stood in one position for eleven years, and it is the position of the one who explains, and it has never once been the position of the one who receives.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you the eleven years were hollow. They were not. Somebody wrote to you, which means at least one person carried something out of that room into a life you will never see, and that is not a small thing and it does not become one because of what has been true about you at the same time.

I am not going to tell you to stop teaching. That would take something real away from a room full of children on Sunday and it would not solve anything.

And I am not going to give you a devotional method. You have handed out about six of those over the years and you know what happens to them. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Matthew 11:28-29, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

What I am going to do is name a posture, because that is all this is, and postures can be changed in an afternoon.

You are not further from Him for having spent eleven years handing Him to children. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not adjusted by which side of a room somebody has been standing on, and the Holy Spirit is in that hall after the chairs have gone back.

The verse is an invitation with a posture in it

There is a passage in Matthew that you have taught. You probably have a version of it for eight year olds involving a wheelbarrow. Scripture stands under that in Matthew 11:28-29, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls.Matthew 11:28-29

Read the first word as somebody being spoken to rather than as somebody with a lesson to deliver.

Come. It is second person. It is addressed. Somebody is being invited, and the invitation is not to understand something; it is to arrive somewhere.

And then look at who is invited. All ye that labor and are heavy laden. Not all ye who need it explained. The qualification is tiredness, and you have been tired for about four years in a way you would not describe as tiredness because you love doing it. It is written, in Matthew 11:28-29, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Then the promise: I will give you rest. Given. Not achieved, not earned by a good year of Sundays.

Here is what has happened to that passage in your hands. It has become material. It is a thing you carry to a room and open for children, and it is excellent material, and it has not been addressed to you since some time before you started teaching.

You are not the one who delivers this passage. Scripture says come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest, Matthew 11:28, and it is spoken in the second person to the tired rather than assigned to the competent, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a text a person teaches back into a sentence spoken to them.

Why the second person will not come

Here is the mechanism, and it is not a failure of devotion.

For eleven years, every time your mind has gone toward God, it has gone with a job attached. How do I say this to a seven year old. What will they ask. Which bit will frighten them. Where is the picture.

That is not a distraction from prayer. It is a genuine and loving act of attention. But it has worn a groove, and the groove runs one way: from God, through you, to somebody else.

So when you sit down with no children in the room, your mind arrives at the same junction and takes the road it has taken two thousand times, and produces a sentence about Him aimed at a listener who is not there.

The second person will not come because it has not been used. Not because it has been refused you.

You are not blocked from being spoken to. Scripture says my sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me, John 10:27, and the hearing is described as a property of belonging rather than as a skill, and the Holy Spirit has been speaking to somebody who has been listening on behalf of a room.

What sitting on the other side looks like

It is smaller than you think and it will feel wrong for about a week.

Take the sentence you say to children. The one you know works, about being loved, or about being found. Say it out loud, to yourself, in the second person, as though somebody were saying it to you.

He is not angry with you. He came looking for you. Whatever your version is.

That will feel absurd. It will feel like a woman of your age playing a game. Do it anyway, because for eleven years those sentences have gone out of you at a hundred children and never once come back in.

Then, and this is the part that matters, say one sentence to Him with the word You in it. Anything true. You know I have not said this in eleven years. That is enough and it is accurate.

You are not required to compose a prayer. Scripture says whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein, Mark 10:15, and receiving as a child is the exact posture you have been teaching two hundred of them to take, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you for anything you have not asked them for every Sunday.