They Have Never Seen a Room Like That

Her daughter asked it in the car, which is where everything gets asked.

Mum, have you ever actually seen anything happen?

Not sarcastically. Ellie is fifteen and she is genuinely curious and she was not trying to be difficult. She had been listening to something and it had said something about God moving, and she wanted to know whether her mother had ever been in the room.

And Steph said, not like that, no.

And that was true. And then they talked about something else, and Ellie was perfectly happy, and Steph drove the rest of the way with her hands on the wheel and something turning over in her chest that has not settled since.

Because there is a fear underneath that question and Steph has had it for years and that was the first time it came out into the open air.

The fear is this. Her children have nothing to go on.

She was raised on stories. Her grandmother had a whole set of them, and one of them was about a night in a hall in the fifties, and one of them was about a healing, and one of them Steph still is not sure about but her grandmother believed it entirely and told it the same way for forty years.

Whatever else those stories did, they made it obvious to a child that God does things.

Steph does not have a set. She has fifteen years of ordinary faithfulness, a good church, a marriage that survived a hard patch, and one afternoon in her twenties that she has never told anybody about and could not describe if she tried.

So when she talks to her children about God, she can hear herself, and what she hears is somebody making a case rather than somebody reporting.

And she has begun to think that the reason they hold it politely at arm's length is that she has handed them a set of beliefs where her grandmother handed her a set of events.

She is not blaming God for that. She would never put it that way.

But it sits there, and it came out in a car in April, and Ellie has forgotten it entirely and Steph has not.

And you may know that exact fear. You may be able to name the thing you cannot hand on, and you may have concluded that your children are going to be poorer for it.

The mechanism named in the psalm is one generation telling the next

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since April and it was never yours.

You are not failing your children by not having a story like your grandmother's. You never were. Scripture names commending His works from one generation to the next as the ordinary mechanism, and it does not specify which works or how spectacular, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the drama of your material, who makes anything of it in a child. Set that down here. It is heavy and it has been sitting in your chest since a Tuesday in the car.

Now hear the line, and hear what it actually asks for.

One generation commends your works to another; they tell of your mighty acts.Psalm 145:4

Commends your works to another.

Not stages an experience for them. Not produces evidence. Tells.

And the psalm does not draw a line between the enormous works and the ordinary ones. The same psalm goes on about how God opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing, which is a description of ordinary provision on an ordinary day, and it is filed under the same heading.

You have works to commend. Fifteen years of them. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who carries any of it into a fifteen year old, and He has never once required a hall in the fifties.

Now let me be careful, because there are ditches on both sides.

Nothing here says the spectacular is not real, or that your grandmother's stories were only useful as psychology. God does do things like that. He has in every generation, and He may in your daughter's.

And nothing here promises you a story of your own to hand over. I cannot promise that and I will not try. Nobody arranges those, nobody earns them, and their absence in your fifteen years is not a report on your praying, your church or your household, and Scripture never once makes it anybody's fault.

Here is the tender part, and it is the whole thing really. You have a set of events and you have not been counting them as events, and His Spirit was in every one of them.

A marriage that survived a hard patch is an event. An afternoon in your twenties you have never told anybody about is an event, and it may be the most important thing in this article. Fifteen years of somebody getting up on a Tuesday when there was no reason to is a set of events, and your daughter has watched every single one of them from close range without being told what she was looking at.

Scripture says one generation commends His works and His Spirit is the one who makes them land, and neither of them ever said the works had to be the loud kind.