The Bad Feeling With No Name

It was the fourth time he had called her back, and it was twenty past nine.

The first three had been water, a leg out of the blanket, and a question about a school trip that is not until June. This one was different. She could tell from the doorway, because he was lying flat on his back with his hands on top of the blanket, which is not how a six year old lies when he wants another five minutes.

"I did something bad."

She sat down on the bed and asked him what, in the ordinary way, and he did not answer. She asked again, gently, and he said he did not know, and then his face went and he said it a second time, cross with himself now. He did not know. He just felt bad. He had felt bad since about the middle of the afternoon and he could not get to the end of it.

Here is where most of us go wrong, and she nearly did.

Every instinct she had said go and find it. Go back through the day together, work out what happened at school, name the thing so it can be dealt with. And she had her hand on the light switch to do exactly that, ready to turn a bedroom into a small enquiry, when something in her stopped.

Because there might not be a thing. And if there is a thing, half past nine at night is not the hour to dig for it, and a six year old with a torch going through his own day looking for the crime is a child learning that a bad feeling means he must have committed one.

So she did not investigate.

She put both her hands over his, and she said one short sentence about a word with an ending in it, and then she said it again, and she did not add anything on to the end of it.

That is the room this is written for. Not a lesson about being good. One ordinary bedroom, one small person going round and round on something that will not name itself, and a parent who has already been in three times.

There is something true about that room, and it is worth having ready before the light goes off.

The feeling is not the evidence

This is the part to be clear about, because everything else rests on it.

A bad feeling with no name is not proof that something happened. Children get tired, and overstimulated, and something at school landed sideways at eleven in the morning, and by evening the body has produced a general sense of being in trouble with nothing at all attached to it. That is not a conscience working. It is a small nervous system at the end of a long day.

And the ache is not the fault. Even where there was a genuine thing, and sometimes there was, the trouble at bedtime is not the thing. It is the going round and round. It is a small person rehearsing it in the dark, waiting for the reckoning to arrive in the morning.

And you are not looking at evidence of anything. Isaiah 43:25 has God saying that He wipes out the wrong things and does not bring them to mind again, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a sentence like that settle in a small chest at twenty past nine.

I am the One who wipes out the wrong things, and I do not bring them to mind again.Isaiah 43:25

Read the second half of that slowly, because that is the half a child needs. Not only that it is dealt with. That it is not coming back up.

You have nothing at all to investigate tonight. Scripture calls Him the God who does not treat us the way our wrongs deserve, and the Holy Spirit is the Comforter in that bedroom, never the prosecutor.

So no list. Do not help a child hunt for it, do not offer suggestions, do not go through the day. Naming things at that hour makes them bigger, and a child who is helped to find a fault learns that the feeling was right all along and that there is always one to find.

Finished means He is not bringing it up

Here is the word this whole message hangs on, and it is not sorry. It is finished.

Children are not really frightened of being told off. They are frightened that it is only postponed. That it is written down somewhere, that it is coming back at breakfast, that the grown ups are being nice about it now and will remember it later. That is the thing that keeps a six year old awake, and finished is the only word that answers it.

You were never asked to get your child sorry enough for anything. His word says that while we were still a long way off He came running to meet us, and the Holy Spirit never waits behind a queue of feelings before He arrives.

Nothing here depends on how sorry a small person manages to be. That is the whole difference between the mercy of God and a school report, and getting it the wrong way round at bedtime teaches a child to work up a feeling in order to qualify for something that was already given.

You are handing over a word that has an ending inside it. Scripture says the work was finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a finished thing begin to feel finished, in His own time rather than on demand.