What She Said Over the Sparrow

For the parent who wakes at two and hears the same sentence every time.

Picture a garden in the last hour of light, and a nine year old kneeling in the grass over a sparrow that has come off the kitchen window.

She's fetched a trowel from the shed without being asked and without telling anybody. The bird is in a tea towel, which was not the plan, and which you will have to deal with quietly later on. Her brother is standing back because he does not like it.

She digs the hole herself, gets it deeper than it needs to be, puts the bird in, and then says a short thing over it. She thanks God for the sparrow, asks Him to look after it, says she is sorry about the window, and then pats the earth flat with the back of the trowel.

Nobody taught her that. She has never sat in a Sunday school in her life.

You think about it at two in the morning, which is when you think about everything, and the voice that arrives is the one that always arrives. It says the word robbed.

They have not been robbed, and the voice saying so keeps its hour for a reason. It is written that the words into a household rather than into a building, and the Spirit was in a garden with a trowel.

The Hour Is Evidence About the Voice

Notice when the sentence comes, because the timing is the most useful fact about it.

It does not come at four in the afternoon when the children are in the garden. It does not come while you are answering a question or praying with them at bedtime. It comes at two in the morning, in the dark, when you are alone, tired, and have nothing in front of you to check it against.

That is the hour when every accusation is unanswerable, because you cannot look at anything. All you have is the sentence itself and a ceiling.

A charge that only ever gets made when the evidence is out of reach is telling you something about the charge. Take it out at eleven in the morning, look at it beside a nine year old with a trowel, and see whether it survives.

It won't. That's been true every time you've tried it, which you have, more than once, standing at a kitchen window in daylight. The trouble is that the daylight verdict doesn't carry over. The voice doesn't argue with it. It simply waits until two, when nothing can be checked, and makes the same charge again.

The accusation only ever arrives when you cannot check it. Scripture hands you something to look at in daylight, and the Spirit brings truth rather than a verdict at two.

The Words Go in the Heart First

Here is the passage, and it begins somewhere people usually skip past.

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, first. Before any instruction about teaching, before the four times of day, the words are to be in the parent. The teaching flows out of a person who is carrying something rather than out of a curriculum.

That's why the sparrow happened. A child doesn't learn to thank God over a dead bird from a lesson. She learns it from being around people for whom that's simply what you do.

Which means the thing you're accusing yourself of not providing is the one thing you have actually been providing, continuously, for nine years, without filing it under anything.

Moses said that to parents whose religious life was going to be conducted in tents for a generation, and it reaches past them to a garden with a kitchen window in it.

What is in the parent is what reaches the child, which is what the verse says first. Scripture's instruction starts in the heart rather than in a room, and the Spirit moved it from you to her without a lesson.

She Prayed Without Being Asked

Stay with what the girl actually did, because it deserves more attention than it got.

She fetched the trowel herself. She handled a dead thing with care, thanked God for it, asked Him to look after it, and apologized for the window, which is a fairly sophisticated moral instinct for nine.

Nobody prompted any of it. There was no adult standing there suggesting that a prayer might be appropriate, and no audience she was performing for, since her brother had gone to stand by the wall.

That's a child for whom God is the obvious party to address when something small has died. You can't teach that in a term, because it comes from years of a household where He's simply spoken about.

Ask her where she learned it and she'll look at you blankly. She won't have an answer, in the same way that she couldn't tell you where she learned to say sorry or to hold a door. It arrived by being near you.

A child who prays over a sparrow unprompted has been formed somewhere. The written Word's instruction describes that forming in ordinary hours, and the Spirit did the part nobody could arrange.

I Am Not Telling You There Is No Cost

Be honest, because the two in the morning voice is not lying about everything.

There is a cost. Your children do not have a group of other believing children their age, and that is a real absence which may matter to them later, particularly around fourteen. I am not going to pretend it is nothing.

Nor am I telling you the voice will stop coming. It probably will not. Two in the morning is a persistent hour.

What I want off you is the word robbed. Not the honest accounting. Not the wish for more for them.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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