God Saw It And God Is Not Cross

She has been down for water twice and has not drunk any of it.

Her father has noticed, in the way you notice a thing without knowing what it means yet. She is six. She said goodnight properly the first time, then came down about the light in the hall, then came down again for the water, and now she is standing at the bottom of the stairs in her socks saying nothing at all.

Nothing is wrong. She says so, and in a way it is completely true. Nothing has happened all evening. The house is calm. Nobody is in trouble.

What is happening is going on behind her eyes, and it is on a loop.

Something happened earlier. It is not a large thing by any measurement a grown-up would use, and this is not the story of what it was, because what it was is not the point and never has been. The point is that nobody found out. Nobody saw. She got away with it entirely, and that is precisely the problem, because there is Somebody she thinks might have seen, and by the fourth time round the loop that Somebody has folded His arms.

So she keeps coming downstairs. Not to confess. She has no words for any of this. She is coming down to check that her father's face is still normal, and it is, and it helps for about ninety seconds, and then she is back upstairs and the loop starts again.

He has now sat on the third stair with her, which is what you do at that point.

If you are on the stairs tonight with a small person who will not say what is wrong, this is written for you. You do not need to find out what it was. You are not going to have to, and the sentence that ends this does not require it.

The rehearsing is the ache, not the thing

The trouble your child is in tonight is not the thing they did. It is the going back over it.

A small person cannot yet put a thing down and leave it down. They pick it up, look at it, put it away, and find it back in their hands a minute later, and each time round it is heavier, because now there is the thing itself and the whole evening of carrying it. By bedtime the carrying is bigger than the thing ever was.

And the loop is powered by one particular fear, so name it accurately. It is not that they will be found out. It is that they already have been, by Someone who does not miss anything, and that the reckoning is simply waiting somewhere up ahead.

You are not the judge in this room and neither is your child. Psalm 103:12 says our wrong has been carried off as far as the east is from the west, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a distance that enormous land inside a six year old's chest.

As far as the east is from the west, that is how far He has put our wrong away from us.Psalm 103:12

That is a deliberately unmeasurable distance, and the Bible could have said any number instead. North and south have a top and a bottom. East and west simply keep going. It is the one direction with no arriving in it, and the sentence was built that way on purpose.

You have nothing to extract from anybody tonight. Scripture never once makes forgiveness wait until somebody has felt sorry enough first, and the Holy Spirit does the softening far better than any question asked on a staircase at half past eight.

Finished means it does not come back up

Here is where the good news gets misdelivered, and it is worth being careful, because the wrong version of this sits very close to the right one.

Being seen is not surveillance. A small person tonight is imagining a pair of eyes that catch things, and that is not who was watching. The One who saw is the one who already knows the whole of them and has never once liked them less for anything He found. Being seen by Him is the good news in this story, not the threat in it.

You were never asked to find out what it was. His word says He knows it already and has already dealt with it, and the Holy Spirit does not need the details read out before a thing can be finished.

Then say the word finished, and say what it means, because a child hears that word from adults all the time and has learned that it usually means later.

Finished means it does not get brought up again. Not brought up at breakfast. Not brought up next time something similar happens. Not kept anywhere, in any drawer, by anybody. There is no postponed reckoning, and that is the sentence a small person is actually waiting for.

You are holding a word that does not get reopened. It is written that He remembers our wrongs no more, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a settled thing settled while a small person is still going back to check on it.

And nothing here rests on how sorry your child manages to feel tonight. Six year olds are not reliable at feeling things to order, and a child who is told to feel sorrier will simply add that to the pile. The finishing was done by Him, and it holds whether or not anybody in socks on the stairs feels the right amount about it.

You have a sentence about being seen that is good news rather than a camera. Scripture says He knows us all the way through and loves us all the way through at the same time, and the Holy Spirit makes being seen feel like being safe.