Do the Words

Ste has run out of things to say on that landing.

Alfie is eight and has been frightened at night since about February. Not of anything in particular, which is the difficult part, because Ste is a man who fixes things and there is nothing here with a shape.

He has tried everything a reasonable person tries. A nightlight, which helped for nine days. The door open a particular amount, which is now measured. A sticker chart, which was a mistake and which they do not discuss. Two conversations about how the brain works that he researched properly and delivered well and which Alfie listened to politely.

He has said there is nothing to be scared of, which is not true and both of them know it.

He has said I am right here, which is true and which lasted about four minutes.

He has said think about something nice, which is the worst advice in the world and which he heard come out of his own mouth and hated.

And on a Tuesday in the March, at about half nine, with Alfie's face doing the thing, Ste stood in that doorway with absolutely nothing left.

He rang his mother on the way down the stairs afterward, which he does not often do.

He said, "What did you used to say to me? At night."

And she said, "You do not remember?"

And he said, "No."

And she said, "Yes you do."

And he was on the third stair and it came up.

Not a prayer he could have quoted an hour before. A short thing, said in a particular order, half of it out of a psalm and half of it his grandmother's own, ending with the same four words every night.

He said it to Alfie the following evening. Badly, in a voice that went odd in the middle, and he apologized halfway through and Alfie told him to carry on.

And the next night, at about the same time, Alfie said:

"Do the words."

Not say the prayer. Not do the thing you did. Do the words, like they were an object in the room.

He has said them every night since March.

Now let me ask you about the door you stand in.

You have run out too. You have tried the reasonable things, and the sensible things, and the thing you read, and you are standing in a doorway at half nine with nothing.

God had a song written in advance

There is a moment near the end of Deuteronomy where God gives Moses an instruction that sounds like a strange use of an old man's last weeks.

Now therefore, write this song for yourselves, and teach it to the sons of Israel; put it on their lips, so that this song may be a witness for Me against the sons of Israel.Deuteronomy 31:19

Write this song. Not a law, not a speech, not a list of instructions, all of which He had already given them. A song.

Put it on their lips. That is an odd phrase and it is precise. Not into their notes. Not into an archive. Onto the part of a person that produces sound without thinking.

And look at why: so that this song may be a witness. He is putting something in them now, deliberately, ahead of time, because He knows there is coming a stretch when they will need something and will not be able to make it.

God writes the words before the crisis. That is the pattern, and it is not sentiment, it is a documented strategy of His.

So hear this said over you, on the third stair with the phone in your hand. You have been given words in advance for exactly this, and the fact that you cannot invent anything tonight is not a failure of yours. That is written into a direct command of God, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings things to remembrance, which is precisely what happened on that stair.

Now let me take one specific weight off you, because you have been carrying it since February.

You have been trying to be sufficient.

Every one of those attempts was you trying to produce, out of yourself, something that would hold an eight year old at half past nine at night. And that is a beautiful instinct and it is also an impossible standard, and you have been quietly failing against it for four months and grading yourself on it every evening.

You are not required to be enough for that landing. Nobody is. The words that hold a frightened person were not written by any of us.

And here is what your mother knew and could get you to in four seconds: you already have some.

They were put in you. By her, or by somebody, in a room you do not remember, in a rhythm you did not choose, and they sat in you for thirty-odd years unused and came up on a staircase the moment you actually reached for them.

Let me guard the two things.

You do not have to say them well. Ste's voice went odd in the middle and he apologized and his son told him to carry on, and that is the actual texture of this every time it matters. Badly is fine. Badly is nearly always how it goes.

And if nothing was put in you, you are not locked out. Go and get some. Take a psalm, take four lines of a hymn, take a blessing off a page, and say the same one every night until it is theirs, and in thirty years it will come up on a staircase for somebody who does not remember learning it.

That is the whole mechanism. That is what God told Moses to do, and it is the plainest thing you can do for a child.

The Word says to let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a thing alive in a family long after everybody who started it has gone.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote a children's evening prayer and put it in a small book for householders, with the instruction that it be said the same way every night, and it is still being said in kitchens and bedrooms all over the world by people who have no idea who wrote it. That was the plan.