For the mother who overheard a prayer under a blanket and didn't know what to feel.
You stop in the hallway with the washing basket on your hip, because you can hear her talking in there and she's on her own.
The fort has been up for two days. It's the good blanket, the one from the back of the sofa, over two chairs and the clothes horse, with a torch inside it that's been on since breakfast.
She's five. She's talking to God about a beetle she found, and about her cousin, and about whether the beetle has a mum. It goes on for a while. There's no structure to any of it and she doesn't say amen. She simply stops, and then starts talking to the beetle instead.
You stand there for the whole of it with a basket digging into your hip.
Afterwards you carry the basket into the kitchen, put it down on the floor beside the machine, and cry for about a minute without being able to say with any confidence which of the two feelings underneath it you were crying about.
Talk is what Moses asked for, and your daughter never needed the machinery. Scripture around ordinary talking in a house, and the Spirit has grown something under a blanket on a Tuesday.
What You Were Waiting to Hear
Name the second feeling, because you already know it and haven't said it out loud to anybody.
Part of you was waiting for what wasn't there. No proper form. No words she'd been taught. Nothing that sounded like the prayers you learned at her age, which had shapes to them and which you can still say from memory thirty years later.
She has none of that. You noticed the absence inside about four seconds, and the noticing felt like a small accusation about your own decisions.
Here's what's worth putting to you. The forms you learned were good, and they were scaffolding. What they were scaffolding toward is a person who talks to God without needing them, which is what you were standing in a hallway hearing.
Scaffolding is not the building. It comes down when the thing it was holding can stand, and nobody mourns a scaffold. You have been mourning the scaffold and standing in the building.
It's worth saying where the grief in that comes from. You didn't learn those forms as decoration. You learned them somewhere, from somebody, probably in a room you can still picture, and some of what they carried you through was genuinely hard. Losing the room felt like losing what the room held.
The forms aren't diminished by a five year old not needing them. A ladder isn't insulted when somebody reaches the shelf.
Your daughter is doing what the forms were built to produce, and she got there without them. Scripture's instruction asks for the words in a household rather than for a form recited, and the Spirit taught her the rest under a blanket.
Talk of Them, All Day Long
Here's the passage, and the word to hold is the plainest one in it.
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)
Talk. That's the verb, repeated across four times of day, and it's the most ordinary word available in any language anybody speaks.
Moses could have said recite, or instruct, or bring them before the priests. He said talk, in the house, on the road, at bedtime, in the morning, which describes a running conversation rather than an event on a timetable.
Those words went first to a people with no synagogues and no schools, and they arrive in a hallway without narrowing. A running conversation is exactly what produces a five year old who talks to God about a beetle.
Your household has a running conversation in it, which is what the passage asks for. The written Word's instruction puts talking at the center of it, and the Spirit has grown something out of that under a blanket.
She Is Not Performing
Point out the part that would be hardest to arrange and easiest to miss entirely.
She was alone. Nobody could hear her as far as she knew. There was no adult to be pleased, no room to be good in front of, and no sense that anything was being assessed by anybody.
A great many children learn to pray for an audience first and then have to unlearn it, sometimes for decades. Some never manage it at all. You'd know, because you had forms to say and somebody heard you say them.
Your daughter's first instinct with God, formed before any of that could get in, is to talk to Him alone in a fort about a beetle. There is nothing thin about any of that. It's what people go on retreats to try to recover.
Notice also what she talked about. A beetle, a cousin, whether the beetle has a mother. That's the actual contents of a five year old's day, brought whole to God without being sorted first into what's suitable.
Most adults can't do that. Most adults arrive with an edited version, having decided in advance which parts of the week are worth raising. She hasn't yet learned to edit, and the editing is the loss rather than the gain.
She prays with nobody watching, which is the hardest thing to teach and the easiest to lose. Scripture's instruction puts the teaching in a house rather than in a performance, and the Spirit has kept her free of an audience.
I Am Not Telling You She Will Keep It
Be honest, because a promise would buy you a comfortable evening and cost you later.
I can't tell you what your daughter will believe at seventeen. Her will is her own and will stay her own. Nobody can hand you a guarantee about another person, and a message that offered one would be exploiting exactly what made you cry in the kitchen.
Nor am I saying she'd gain nothing from a room with other children in it. She might gain a great deal. If a door opens and it's right for your household, take it.
What I want off you is the fear that she's lost something. Not the ambition for her. Not the tears.
The Second Thing You Were Crying About
The turn here is about the crying rather than about the fort.
You said you couldn't tell which of the two you were crying about. Both were the same thing arriving at once, which is precisely why they were so hard to separate.
You heard a child talk to God freely, and at the same moment you heard the absence of everything you'd assumed was necessary for that to happen. Those two arrived together because they're the same discovery, and the discovery is that the machinery wasn't the thing.
That's a relief and a grief in the same breath. A relief because she has it. A grief because you spent years believing you couldn't have it without the machinery, and some of those years were hard ones.
You heard the machinery being unnecessary, which is why both feelings came at once. The written Word's instruction puts the teaching in the house rather than in the structure, and the Spirit has proved it in a fort made of a sofa blanket.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Say this as somebody standing inside Christ, because that is where you stand. The Spirit carries what agreement says, and nothing about the result is being promised to you here.
Say it once without adding anything.
Talk is the word Moses chose, and my daughter has it without the machinery. It is written that I talk of these words in my house, on the road, at bedtime and in the morning, and talk is the plainest word He could have used. The Spirit has grown something under a blanket that I did not arrange. I am not waiting to hear an absence any more. She prays with nobody watching, which is the hardest thing to teach and the first thing she had. I give the outcome to God and put the word lost down.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Deuteronomy 6:6-7
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
