Three Arguments Before The Amen

Ten past seven on a Saturday morning in April, and the allotment gate is still wet.

Yusra has plot thirty one. She has had it nine years, since the year everything went wrong and a friend told her to go and dig something. Broad beans are up along the north edge under frost cloth pegged at both ends. There is a flask of tea on the upturned crate and a robin on the handle of the fork who has no fear of her whatsoever.

She kneels on the folded sack at the end of the row, the way she kneels every Saturday morning, and she starts the prayer her mother taught her when she was five years old.

It is four lines. It is in the language her mother used for it, which is not the language she thinks in now. It rhymes in a way that only works out loud. Her mother said it over her with a hand flat on her head in a room with a green blanket in it, and Yusra has said it more times in her life than she has said her own address.

She gets three words in.

And here they come.

First: the word in the second line does not mean what her mother thought it meant. She knows that, because she looked it up eleven years ago, and it was a small quiet demolition that she never mentioned to anybody.

Second: this is a prayer for a child of five, and she is forty six, and there is something not quite honest about a woman of forty six with soil on her knees reciting a nursery rhyme at a row of beans.

Third, and this is the one that lands: she believes any of this only because a woman with a warm hand said it over her before she could read. Change the room. Change the hand. Change the language, and she would be kneeling here this morning saying something else with exactly the same conviction.

Three of them. All reasonable. Two of them more or less correct.

She stops at line two. She always stops around line two.

"Never mind," she says, out loud, to the beans.

So she pours the tea and weeds the row instead. Her hands do what her hands have done for nine years, pinching out, firming in, moving down the row on her knees. The robin drops onto the fork handle. The light comes up over the shed roofs and turns the frost cloth gold.

Notice where she is, because it matters. She is on her knees on a wet sack at ten past seven on a Saturday morning. That is not what a person who has stopped believing does with a Saturday.

She has not reached the end of that prayer in about four years.

She has said the first line of it and stopped, probably a thousand times.

The floor under the scaffolding

Before anything else I want to say something about those three arguments, because the cheap version of this message would tell you to throw them in the compost, and I will not do that to you. You did not pick them up by accident. You went and looked the word up. You read carefully, at some cost, and it changed things. That was honest work, and anybody who tells you that thinking is what ruined your faith is asking you to be smaller than God made you.

The arguments are not the problem. The order is the problem. They are early.

An argument is a tool for testing a claim, and it is a good tool. But at ten past seven on a Saturday it is doing a job it was never built for, which is standing between a grown woman and the second line of the prayer her mother taught her.

There is a moment in Matthew that begins with grown men asking a ranking question. Who is the greatest in the kingdom. Which is a sides question, a briefing question, the exact question that puts a person in a camp. And He does not answer it with a ranking. He calls a small child over and stands him in the middle of the whole conversation.

Take this before you read what He said, because you are His and this is not an examination you are about to sit. What is written in Matthew 18:3 is not a demand that you become simple. It is an invitation to turn, and turning is not a thing anybody argues themselves into. The Holy Spirit does it, which is why this has never depended on you thinking your way back to the age of five.

Truly I tell you, unless you turn and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.Matthew 18:3

Read it slowly. He does not say become ignorant. He does not say unlearn what has been learned, and He does not say a five year old knows more than a woman of forty six. A five year old is not a person with no information. A five year old is a person who receives without first checking whether receiving is safe, and that is the thing He is pointing at with a small boy standing in the middle of a seniority argument.

Here is the word I want in your hands this morning. Underneath. Not instead of. Nobody is asking you to demolish eleven years of careful reading in order to finish four lines at the end of a row of beans. You go underneath them.

You were handed something at five years old that the arguments have been standing on top of ever since, and it is still holding them up. That is the actual order of it. Scripture says His mercies are new every morning and great is His faithfulness, and it is His Spirit under that floor, which means the arguments were never the ground you stand on. They are scaffolding, and scaffolding is always bolted to a wall it did not build.

Take the third argument, since it is the one that stops you. You believe this because a woman with a warm hand said it over you before you could read. That is true. It is also true of your first language, your fear of deep water, the way you hold a knife, and every good thing anybody handed you before you were able to evaluate it. Where a thing came in was never the question. Whether it is true is the question, and you have spent eleven years testing this one, and it is still here at seven in the morning with you on your knees.

You have not been believing out of habit. Habit does not kneel on a wet sack in April. Scripture says the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart, and that nearness is His Spirit's doing and His Spirit's keeping, which is exactly why the first line still comes up in you before you have decided to say it.