I Am Teaching Her The Scoreboard

It was in the car on the way back from Maya's.

They had been playing all afternoon and it had been a good one and she was in the back with her shoes off, and out of nowhere she said: Maya's house is nicer than ours.

Not unkindly. Not complaining. She said it the way a child says a fact she has worked out, with a slight satisfaction at having noticed something.

And you said something light and put the radio on.

And you drove the rest of the way home with your hands at ten and two, and you have thought about it every day since Tuesday.

Because you know where she got it.

She did not get it at school. She is nine and the children at that school do not talk like that. She did not get it off a screen.

She got it from a car exactly like this one, on a road exactly like this one, some evening when you said something about somebody's kitchen and she was in the back with her shoes off, listening to everything, the way they do.

What she is learning is the ranking

Let me be precise about what got transmitted, because it is not what you probably think.

She has not learned that your house is worse. That is a conclusion, and it will change, because houses come and go and a nine year old's opinions about kitchens are not durable.

What she has learned is that houses go on a scale.

That is the transferable part. It is not a fact about your house or Maya's. It is a method, and a method is portable, and it will still be working in her at thirty two in somebody's hallway.

You have handed on a method rather than an opinion, and one afternoon at a friend's house has never once been what taught a child to rank anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who was in the car on the way back from Maya's, and it is written in Deuteronomy 6 that 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 here is the part that is genuinely good news, though it will take a moment to land.

The channel is open.

Whatever put the ranking in went in through ordinary talk in a car, unplanned, without a lesson, in about four seconds. Which means the channel that carries this is the one you use every single day, and it is not the sit down conversation, and it is not a talk about values.

It is the car. It is what gets said about somebody in an ordinary voice on the way home.

You have the one channel that actually carries this, and a sit down conversation about values has never once gone in the way four seconds on a road does. Deuteronomy 6 names the walking and the sitting and the lying down and no lesson time at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one who located the teaching in the traffic.

You have a channel that is open every day, and something learned in four seconds in a back seat has never once been beyond being taught again in the same place. Deuteronomy 6 puts the teaching in the walking and the sitting and the lying down rather than in a lesson, and the Spirit of God is the one who located it there.

Thou shalt teach them diligently

Here is the passage, and look at where it puts the teaching.

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, King James Version)

Sitting in the house. Walking by the way. Lying down. Rising up.

Four settings, and not one of them is a lesson. There is no classroom in that verse and no appointed time. It is the whole ordinary surface of a day, which is the only place a child actually learns anything about how the world is to be read.

And notice that it says talk of them. Not teach them at them. Talk, in the ordinary voice, about the things that are true, while the day is happening.

You have been teaching in exactly the setting that verse names, and a car on the way home has never once been outside where the real teaching happens. The Holy Spirit is the one who put it in the traffic, and the written word puts it in the walking and the sitting and gives no lesson time at all.

And there is something in that which I want to leave with you, because it protects you from the guilt that has been running since Tuesday.

If this all happened by accident, in four seconds, without a decision, then nothing negligent occurred. It was a person being a person, out loud, near a child, which is the arrangement God designed.

The same arrangement runs in both directions and it is running right now.

You were never negligent, and a mother talking in an ordinary voice near her own child has never once been a mother failing at anything. Deuteronomy 6 assumes exactly that arrangement and builds the whole instruction on it, and the Spirit of God is the one who set it up that way.