My Own Children Cannot Say It

Somebody asked your son what his mother does, and you were standing close enough to hear him answer.

He said she makes things. Or he said she does stuff on the computer. Or he shrugged, which was the worst one, and the adult smiled and moved on and nobody thought anything of it except you.

And you have gone over it since, and you know he was not being unkind and he was not embarrassed. He simply did not have the sentence. Nobody had ever handed it to him.

There are people who pay you every month. There is a phone in this house that rings for you. There is a room in this house given over to it. And a nine year old who lives here could not say what it is.

I am not going to tell you that your children need you to be more confident. That is not the problem in this kitchen. The problem is that a sentence has never been said out loud in front of them, and a child cannot repeat a sentence he has not heard.

Twelve stones, set where the children would trip over them

There is a strange instruction in the book of Joshua, and it is about children asking questions. The people have just crossed the Jordan, and God tells them to take twelve stones out of the riverbed and stack them on the far bank.

Not as a monument to themselves. The reason is given outright, and the reason is the children.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? Then ye shall answer them. (Joshua 4:6, King James Version)

You are allowed to set something where your children can see it, and that has never once been showing off. Joshua 4:6 has twelve stones stacked for the sole purpose of making a child ask, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an instruction given at a riverbed and puts it in a kitchen.

Read the verse again, because it is not what anybody expects. The stones were stacked so that a child would ask. The whole point of the pile was to provoke the question, and then there was an answer ready for it.

God did not leave it to the children to work out for themselves. He did not assume they would absorb it from the air. He had stones dragged up a riverbank so the question would come and the answer would be given in plain words.

You have an answer to give and it was always meant to be given in plain words. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a thing said at a riverbed three thousand years ago land on a woman clearing plates, and Joshua 4:6 treats the answer to a child's question as something a household prepares rather than improvises.

They are not guessing, they are repeating

Here is what I want you to hear, and it is meant as a kindness rather than a correction. Your children are not inventing an answer when somebody asks them. They are doing their best with what they have been given.

And what they have been given is what they have heard in this house. They have heard it called nothing much. They have heard it called a bit of fiddling about. They have heard the phone ring and heard an apology to whoever was in the room, as though the call were an intrusion into the real life of the family rather than a part of it.

You were the source of the only description they own, and it was never once a deliberate choice. Joshua 4:6 has the answer placed in the parent's mouth before the child has even asked the question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person what her own words have been quietly building in the people who live with her.

So when a teacher asks, a child reaches for the nearest available sentence. The nearest available sentence is the one his mother uses, and he will use it word for word, including the shrug.

None of that is a failure of love and none of it is neglect. It is a gap. A gap is a thing that can be filled tonight, which is not true of most of the things people carry around about themselves.

You have something simple to put in a gap, and it has never once required you to become a different person first. The Spirit of God does not wait for a woman to feel confident before He makes an honest word possible, and Joshua 4:6 puts a plain answer in an ordinary parent's mouth with no qualification attached to it at all.

What a plain sentence does at a table

So here is the sentence, and notice how ordinary it is. I make curtains for people and they pay me for them. I do the books for four small companies. I cut hair in the back room on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

That is the whole of it. No adjectives. Not a speech about how much it matters, and not a joke on the end to take the weight back out of it. Just the thing, said flat, while the plates are being cleared.

You are able to say a plain sentence in your own kitchen, and it has never once needed an adjective on either side of it. Joshua 4:6 has a parent answering in the plainest possible words at the place where the stones were stacked, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an unadorned description possible for a woman who has only ever used a small one.

And your children will not react. That is worth knowing in advance, because you will be braced for something. A nine year old will say okay and ask what is for dessert, and you will think nothing happened at all.

Something happened. He has the sentence now. He did not have it this morning, and he will have it at the school gate on Monday.

You are handing your own children a true word about their mother, and it has never once been pride to do it. The Spirit of God is the one who does the quiet work in a room after an honest sentence has been said in it, and the written word has God himself arranging for a child to ask and be told in Joshua 4:6.