She Asked What It Meant

It was a Tuesday, and there was toast.

Sophie is fifteen and she does her homework at the kitchen table with one headphone in, and she asks things sideways, the way fifteen year olds do, so that if the answer is embarrassing she can pretend she was not really asking.

She said, without looking up, Auntie Kate, what does that word actually mean? Because Jess's mum says it like it's a bad thing.

And Kate, who has read a great deal, and who genuinely knows the material, and who loves this girl more than almost anything, talked for four minutes.

She said it does not mean what people think it means. She said it has been used for things that are nothing to do with it. She said there is a lot of history attached that is not fair and some that is. She said you have to understand that in different countries it means different things. She said, twice, it's complicated.

Sophie nodded through all of it, in that generous way children have when an adult is clearly trying.

Then she said, okay, and put the other headphone in.

And Kate stood at the sink with her back to the room and understood, with total clarity, that she had just been asked the easiest question of her life and had not answered it.

She had answered a different question. She had answered what is wrong with the word, which is a question Sophie did not ask, and which Sophie has actually never asked, and which Kate has been silently answering in her own head for about six years.

The girl asked what it means.

And Kate could not say the thing in a sentence, in front of a fifteen year old, over toast, without hedging it.

She could argue about it for an hour. She could hold her own with anybody. What she could not do was put one plain sentence on the table and leave it there without immediately picking it back up to explain it.

That is the whole ache and it is not about apologetics at all. She has all the material. It is that somewhere in the last decade she began treating the word as a thing that requires a defense, and a defended word is a word you can never simply hand to a child.

So she stood at the sink and thought, she asked me a question about God and I gave her a press briefing.

And you know that sink. You know the exact moment afterwards when you realize what you did with the four minutes.

The whole thing fits in a sentence, because it started as one

Take this off first, because you have been carrying it and it was never yours to carry.

You are not the defense counsel for a word. You never were. Scripture puts a plain announcement in your hands and never once appoints you to argue the case history, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the quality of your framing, who makes a sentence land in a fifteen year old. Set the brief down. It has been heavy for years and it was never your job.

Now hear where the word starts, because the first time anybody says it in the story, it is one sentence long.

Jesus comes into Galilee. He has no platform, no organization, no building, and no context to give anybody. And He says one thing, and it is short enough to shout across a beach.

The time has come. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news.Mark 1:15

The good news. That phrase is the word. That is where it comes from. That is the whole of it.

And look at the shape. Something has happened. It is here. Turn around and take it.

There is not one word of defense in it. There is no history in it, no context, no it's complicated. It is the shortest possible sentence that a person could act on standing up, in a road, with fish on their hands.

You have that sentence. It is in you right now, and it is not something you have to qualify to say. That is written, and His Spirit is the one who put it there, and He did not hand it over on the condition that you become able to defend it first.

Here is the part that will loosen something, and I want you to have it slowly.

You have been treating a gift as a position. A position is something you hold, under fire, on a hill. A gift is something you pass across a table. They require completely opposite postures, and you have been in the wrong one at your own kitchen table with a child who loves you. Scripture hands it across rather than defends it, and His Spirit is the one who carries it over.

Sophie did not attack you. Nobody attacked you. There was toast.

And this is why the four minutes came out. Not cowardice, and not confusion either. You have simply been in the defended posture for so long that it fires automatically, even when the room is safe, even when the person asking is fifteen and eating and half hoping you will say something that matters.

You are able to say it plainly. Right now, tonight, with no preparation at all. Scripture says the good news has come near, and near is a word about distance, and the same Spirit who carried that sentence up a beach is the one carrying it in you, so the plainness is not something you have to manufacture. It is what the sentence already is.

And I will say the honest thing, because you would want me to. The four minutes did not protect her from anything. She was not at risk. She went upstairs with nothing, and nothing is the one answer that word has never given anybody in two thousand years.