The Prayer Beside the Loose Shoelace

For the parent who prayed eleven words at a school gate and drove off ashamed.

It's 8:41, the bell goes at 8:45, and he's crouched down doing his own lace for the third time because he won't let you do it any more.

Then, without standing up, he asks whether you can pray about the spelling test.

You've four minutes, a car behind you with its engine running, and a coat you didn't fasten because you were late. You put a hand on his shoulder and say eleven words, most of them ordinary, one of them his name.

He says thanks in the way a seven year old says thanks, which is barely, and runs. You watch him reach the door and you get back in the car.

By the first roundabout the shame has arrived. That was it. That was the whole of your child's religious instruction this week, delivered in four minutes at a gate by a parent who was already late.

Your son asked you unprompted, which is the whole aim of the passage you think you are failing. The Word says that the talking into the walking, and the Spirit carried a boy's spelling test upward from a pavement.

The Standard in Your Head Is Borrowed

There's a picture of what a religious household looks like, and you have been measuring a school gate against it.

In the picture there's an evening, a lamp, a chapter read aloud, and children sitting still. Somebody explains something. Questions get asked and answered properly. The whole thing has a shape and a duration you can see clearly enough to fail against.

Where did that picture come from? Not from Deuteronomy, which describes something a good deal scrappier. Probably from a painting, or a book, or a family you knew once whose evenings you only ever saw from outside their window.

That last one is the most common source and the most misleading. You never saw the argument before supper, the child who wouldn't sit down, or the father too tired to finish the chapter who pretended the clock had beaten him.

You aren't failing Scripture's standard, because the picture in your head came from somewhere else. It is written that the teaching on the road and in the doorway, and the Spirit makes that the real arrangement rather than the fallback.

Talking by the Way

Here's the verse, and the second half is a list of moving parts rather than a scene.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:7 (KJV)

Walkest by the way. That's the road, the journey, the bit between places. Not the arrival anywhere. Moses names traveling as one of the four hours, and it's the one that fits a school run exactly.

Notice the verb too, which is talk. Not teach a lesson, not conduct anything. Talk of them, in the ordinary way people talk while they're going somewhere.

Those words went first to a people about to be constantly on the move, and they arrive at a school gate without narrowing. Eleven words on a pavement is talking by the way.

Eleven words on a pavement is talking by the way, not a substitute for it. Scripture's instruction puts the talking on the road, and the Spirit carried it while a car waited behind you.

He Asked You

Say the thing you drove past without noticing, because it's the largest fact in that whole morning.

He asked. Nobody prompted him. He was crouched over a lace with four minutes left and he raised it himself, which means that when something worried him, his instinct was to bring it to you and to God in the same sentence.

That instinct is the entire object of Deuteronomy 6. Everything about the four hours and the talking is aimed at producing a child for whom God is an ordinary part of a Tuesday.

That's the outcome the whole passage is built toward. Not a child who can recite, and not a child who behaves well in a room. A child who raises it themselves, at an inconvenient moment, because it hasn't occurred to them that there's a proper time for it.

You got that. On a wet pavement, four minutes before a bell, from a boy who wouldn't let you touch his shoelace. Whatever else is missing from your week, the thing the passage is aiming at has arrived.

You have been grading your eleven words. The thing worth looking at is that a seven year old with a spelling test asked for them.

Your child asked you unprompted, which is what the passage exists to produce. The written Word's instruction aims at a household where the words are ordinary, and the Spirit has made them ordinary enough for a boy to ask at a gate.

I Am Not Telling You It Is All Fine

Be honest, because there's no interest in comforting you with something that won't hold.

I can't promise you an outcome for your son. He has a will of his own, it belongs to him, and nobody has the right to hand you a guarantee about another person. Any message that did would be trading on how frightened you are at a roundabout.

Nor am I telling you a room full of other children would be worthless to him. It might be very good. If it becomes right for your household, go gladly.

What I'm taking off you is the shame at the first roundabout. Not the wish to do more. Not the love that produces it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Imani This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.