The Prayer Beside the Lunchbox

For the parent who fears their children are missing the training they once had.

Suppose a man is standing at the counter on a Wednesday evening packing a lunchbox for the morning, because doing it at night is the only way it gets done properly.

His son is at the table doing something with a pencil that isn't homework. The lid of the lunchbox is off, there's a yoghurt that needs the date checking, and the radio is on low.

The boy says, out of nowhere, whether they can pray for Danny, because Danny's dad has gone to live somewhere else.

The father stops with the yoghurt in his hand. He's nothing prepared. Nobody has trained him for a Wednesday at twenty past eight, and the only thing he knows about Danny is that he came round once and broke a tap.

So he puts the yoghurt down, comes over, and prays for about twenty seconds with his hand on the back of a chair. Then he goes back and finishes the lunchbox.

The boy doesn't look up from the pencil. Nothing about the evening marks itself out as important, which is the ordinary condition of most of what turns out to matter later.

He'll remember it, though, in the way children remember weather rather than events. Not the words. Not the date. That when something bad happened to somebody at school, the kitchen was where it got said out loud.

The words go into the parent first, and that's the only qualification the passage asks for. It is written that the order down in that sequence, and the Spirit supplies what a counter on a Wednesday needs.

The Word Training Is Doing the Damage

Training is a word from somewhere else, and it's been quietly reshaping what you think you owe your children.

Training implies a trainer, a program, a sequence, and somebody qualified to deliver it. Measured against that, a man with a yoghurt in his hand is unqualified in every particular, and he knows it inside half a second.

Deuteronomy doesn't use the language of training anywhere. It uses the language of talking, in a house, at four ordinary hours, by the person who lives there.

That isn't a lower standard. It's a different job altogether, and you have been failing an examination for a post nobody appointed you to.

You were never appointed to the post you keep failing, because the job given was talking rather than training. Scripture hands these words to parents in the hours of a household, and the Spirit equips that rather than a curriculum.

In Thine Heart, Then to Thy Children

Here's the passage, and the order of the two halves is the part worth noticing.

And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 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 6:6-7 (KJV)

In thine heart comes first. Before any instruction to teach, the words are to be in the parent, which means the qualification asked for is possession rather than expertise.

Then it says teach them unto thy children. Not send them to be taught, not ensure that they receive teaching from a competent party. Thou shalt, in the second person, to the parent standing in the house.

Those words went first to a whole generation of ordinary Israelites with no training among them, and they arrive at a kitchen counter without narrowing.

The passage asks for possession, never for expertise. Scripture's instruction puts the teaching in the parent's hands directly, and the Spirit supplies what the evening needs.

Warmth Is Not the Opposite of Depth

Say something to the part of you that suspects this is all a bit soft.

You came from somewhere with substance. Real teaching, hard passages handled properly, a sense that faith had weight and structure to it. You're afraid that what your son is getting is warm and thin: affection without content, a household kind about God rather than serious about Him.

That fear deserves respect rather than dismissal. Thin is a real risk and I won't pretend otherwise.

Households do go thin. It happens gradually, by way of a hundred conversations that stay on the surface because nobody has the appetite to go further, and the people inside it rarely notice while it's happening.

But twenty seconds about a boy whose father has left isn't thin. That's a child learning that God is spoken to about the actual state of the world, which is a good deal more substantial than many lessons with handouts.

You can be warm and substantial at once, because depth was never the enemy of affection. The written Word's instruction puts the weightiest words in the most domestic settings, and the Spirit makes twenty seconds carry real weight.

I Am Not Telling You What He Becomes

Be plain, because a promise would be worth nothing and you'd see through it by Christmas.

I can't tell you what your son will believe at twenty. His will is his own and always will be. Nobody is entitled to hand you an outcome, and any message that did would be using your love against you.

Nor am I telling you that a room with other children would add nothing. It might add a great deal. If it becomes right, go, and don't look back at a word of this.

What I want off you is the sense that you've been disqualified. Not the ambition for him. Not the fear of thinness.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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