The Small Chair at Parents' Evening

The chairs in that classroom are eleven inches off the floor and they are the correct height for a person who is nine, and every adult in the building tonight is folded onto one with their knees somewhere near their chin, and everybody is being very good humored about it.

Her turn is at ten past six. The teacher has a folder open on the low table and she is going through it with real pleasure, because this is the easy conversation, the one she has been looking forward to all evening. He is kind. He is funny. He looked after a new boy in September without being asked and did not tell anybody he had done it. His handwriting is a disgrace and will remain a disgrace. There is a painting of a lighthouse that is genuinely, unaccountably good.

And then the teacher says the thing that teachers say, warmly, with no idea what she is handing over. She says: he is a credit to you.

There is a silence of about a second and a half. The mother laughs and says something about the handwriting. The teacher laughs too. The next parent is already hovering at the door with a coat over one arm. It is a good evening and nothing at all has gone wrong in it.

But under that second and a half was a whole sentence, complete, arriving the way it has arrived for twenty years: she would not say that if she knew.

And here is what I want to say before anything else, because you deserve to know where this message is going. There is nothing to know. Something was done to you a long time ago, by somebody else, and you have been carrying it since as though it were a record with your name at the top of it. I am not going to ask you what it was. Not now, not later, not at the end of this. I am not going to ask you to tell a single human being anything, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

The act had an author, and it was not you

I want to be very plain, because plainness is the whole medicine here.

An act belongs to the person who does it. That is not a nice idea, it is how God has arranged the moral universe, and He arranged it that way on purpose so that nobody could ever be charged with somebody else's hands. Scripture says outright that the soul that sins bears its own iniquity, that a son does not carry a father's guilt and a father does not carry a son's, and that God does not confuse the two even when everybody around Him is confusing them.

You have spent years quietly failing an examination you were never entered for.

You are not the author of what was done to you, and you were never listed on it. I am not offering you sympathy there, and sympathy is not what you came for. The written word divides an act from the person it was done to and refuses to blur them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it down in the place where the sentence keeps arriving.

For your shame ye shall have double; and for confusion they shall rejoice in their portion.Isaiah 61:7

Look at who that is spoken to, because the answer is important and it is not who people assume.

It is spoken to a people who were done to. Invaded, taken, held, robbed of a country. Their shame was not something they did, it was something that happened to them and then stuck to them, which is the whole subject of your life and mine.

And notice what God does not do in that verse. He does not explain it. He does not give them a reason, and He does not hand them a lesson about what they might learn from it. He gives them a portion, which is the word for a share of land with your name on it, and He gives them double, and He does it in their own country, in front of the people who watched.

You have a portion with your own name on it, and you have it as a gift and never as compensation you had to argue for. That is what the written word says in the plainest terms available, and His Spirit is the one who makes an inheritance feel like something a person can actually stand on.

The credit for a good child is not in dispute

Now I want to go back to that classroom, because there is something specific happening there and it is worth naming.

When the teacher said he is a credit to you, she was making a straightforward observation about a boy who looked after a new lad in September. She was not conducting a hearing. And you heard a hearing, because you have been in one for twenty years, and after twenty years every warm sentence sounds like a question you are about to fail.

So hear this from somebody standing outside the room. The kindness in that child came through your house. It came through your patience and your hours and your unremarkable Tuesdays, and none of it is affected in any way whatsoever by something another person did before he was born.

You are a woman who raised a kind boy, and you have that as a plain fact rather than as a claim under review. Scripture says the fruit tells you about the tree, and it is the Holy Spirit, not my encouragement, who makes a fact like that go all the way down.