A Very Present Help

Farrah asked at half past seven with her light already off.

That is when they ask. Never at a sensible time, never when you have anything in you. Half past seven, in the dark, from under a duvet, with the voice they use when they have been thinking about something all day and have finally found the courage.

"Mummy. What's a very present help?"

Nadia said, "What, love?"

"At the thing. On Sunday. They said God is a very present help in trouble. What's a very present help?"

And Nadia, who has been in church her entire life, who was on the worship team for six years, who knows that verse so well she could not tell you when she learned it, said this:

"It means... He's always there. He's, um. He's a help. In trouble. So when things are hard, He's a present. Not a present present. Present like, here."

Farrah said, "Okay."

Nadia said, "Does that make sense?"

And Farrah, who is six and honest, said, "Not really."

Nadia went downstairs and stood in the kitchen with her hands on the counter and had a small crisis about it that she did not tell anybody about for eleven days.

Now here is what happened on the Thursday.

They are at a bus stop. It has been raining the sort of rain that comes sideways, and Farrah has gone through a puddle deeper than it looked, and one shoe has filled completely, and she has done the thing where a six year old goes past being cross into actual grief.

And Nadia crouches down and holds both her arms and says, in a voice with absolutely nothing spiritual in it:

"Hey. Listen. I'm right here. I'm not going to go off and get someone. I'm not ringing anybody. I'm the one that's here, all right? Right here, right now, with you, and we're going to sort your shoe out."

And Farrah stopped crying, and looked at her, and said:

"Is that the very present help?"

The teaching was never meant to happen in a study

Moses tells a whole nation how the truth is going to be handed on, and the striking thing is where he says it happens.

These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.Deuteronomy 6:6 to 7

Read the list of locations. Sitting in the house. Walking along the road. Lying down. Getting up.

Not one of them is a classroom. Not one of them involves preparation. Every single one is an ordinary moment of an ordinary day, which means God designed the handing on of His word to happen in exactly the register in which you say put your coat on and mind the step.

And shall talk of them. Not lecture. Talk. Which is the thing you were doing at that bus stop, in the rain, without preparing anything.

So hear it, because you have been carrying an eleven day crisis you did not deserve. You are equipped for this, and the answer you could not give at half past seven came out of you perfectly on the Thursday, and it came out perfectly because it came out of your own mouth in your own words. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the teacher in the house, and He has been doing His teaching through your ordinary sentences for years without asking your permission.

Now let me tell you why it froze at bedtime, because it was not ignorance.

You reached for a definition.

The moment a child asks what a verse means, something in a person switches into explain mode, and explain mode goes hunting for the official words. And the official words are not in you, because you were never taught the verse as a definition. You were taught it as an experience, and you have it stored as one, and you cannot retrieve an experience by looking for a dictionary entry.

At the bus stop you did not look for anything. You just did the thing the verse is about. And a six year old recognized it instantly, because children are not fooled by vocabulary in either direction.

Here is what that means for you. You know more than you can currently say, and Scripture is plain that these words are to be on your heart before they are ever on your tongue, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings a heart thing to a mouth at the right moment. That is not a technique you have to master. It is a promise about how He works.

Let me protect something here, because it matters.

There is nothing wrong with knowing the definition, and there is nothing wrong with a person who can explain the Hebrew behind very present and tell you it carries the sense of being abundantly found. That is a gift and I am glad for it.

But your daughter did not need a lexicon at half past seven. She needed a woman crouching in the rain. And that is not a lesser version of the truth, it is the primary version, and the definition exists to describe it.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote a book of Christian teaching for householders, and the whole thing is built as questions a child might actually ask, answered in the words a parent would actually use, and he wrote it because he had gone round the villages and found grown adults who could not say in their own language what they believed. He did not blame them. He blamed everybody who had left it in a language they could not use.