They Think He Is Watching

She is nine and she was not being funny and she was not complaining.

You were in the car and she was doing that thing where she thinks out loud, and she said something about a boy at school, and then she said: well, He would have seen it anyway.

He would have seen it anyway.

Not: He was with her. Not: He is looking after her. Seen it. Like a camera in a corner, like the thing on the ceiling in the corridor at school, like an adult who has walked in at the wrong moment.

And you drove on and said something about the boy, and she moved on to something else inside about four seconds, and you have been carrying that sentence for two months.

Because you know exactly where she got it, and it was not from a book and it was not from her school.

You have been careful. You have been careful for years, and about a great many things, and every one of those cautions was well meant and most of them were right. But careful is a tone as well as a decision, and you have been in a car with that child for nine years.

She has not learned a rule. She has learned an atmosphere.

Paul says which spirit was not given

There is a sentence in Romans where Paul names, precisely, the kind of relating that Christians did not receive, and then names what came instead, and the second half is a word a nine year old would use.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Not the spirit of bondage again to fear.

He is that specific. The way of relating to God that runs on being watched, on getting it wrong, on the small permanent tightening in the chest, is named and excluded, and it is excluded by a man who had lived inside it professionally for years and knew exactly what it felt like.

And what is put in its place is not a doctrine, it is a word out of a child's mouth. Abba. The word a small child uses in a kitchen.

So take this now, two months on. You have been given the second one and never the first. The written word names the watching spirit and rules it out by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who cries Abba in a person, and there is not a version of this in which He is chiefly a monitor.

Your carefulness was love and it had a tone

Now let me hold both halves, and I will not drop either, because you have done nine years of a hard and mostly invisible job.

The carefulness came from love. Every single caution had a child's wellbeing underneath it. You were not policing her; you were trying to get her safely to the far side of a world you know more about than she does.

And most of it was right. She is nine and she is fine and she is thinking out loud in a car with her mother, which is more than a great many nine year olds have.

But a tone travels further than a rule and it travels earlier, and children absorb the atmosphere of a house years before they can name a single thing that is in it.

And the atmosphere she has been in is one where the important thing about God is that He notices.

That is not what you believe. If somebody asked you directly you would say the opposite, and you would mean it. It is simply what has been in the room.

You have received the Spirit of adoption. His word rules out the other one by name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who cries Abba in you, and He has been doing it under all nine years of the carefulness.

The plain hall and the word it made warm

In 1895 a man named Phineas Bresee opened a hall near the middle of Los Angeles and would not let anybody rent a seat, and the doctrine that hall existed to preach was a heart made wholly God's.

And here is what was actually said in that room, according to everybody who wrote about it: that this is a gift, that it is given to people who cannot manufacture it, and that the ones with nothing get it first.

That is not a watched room. That is the opposite of a watched room. The whole architecture of the place, from the free seats to the doctrine, was built to take the surveillance out.

And it filled with people from those streets, many of whom had spent their whole lives being watched by somebody.

The written word names the spirit of bondage and rules it out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put a child's word in an adult's mouth.