The Race Is Tomorrow, Not Tonight

The kit is folded on the chair with the plimsolls on top, and it has been folded there since five o'clock, which is how you know.

Sports day tomorrow. The race after lunch. The whole school on the grass, both sets of parents along the rope, somebody's grandad with a camera, and your son in the middle lane in a house color vest.

He is seven. He is not fast. He knows both of those things with total clarity, and he has known them since Wednesday.

He has been very quiet about it all evening, which is worse than complaining. He ate his tea. He did his teeth. Then, in the dark, in the flat voice children keep for their most serious business, he asked whether he could be ill tomorrow. Not could he please stay home. Whether he could be ill. As though illness were something you might have in a cupboard.

And you nearly said it. The sentence was right there behind your teeth, the one every parent in the country reaches for, and it is the one thing you must not say.

You will be brilliant.

Because he might not be. He might come fifth. He might trip on the grass in front of everybody he knows and get up with a green stain on one knee and his ears burning, and if you have promised him brilliance tonight, then tomorrow afternoon he will be standing on that field knowing you were wrong, and that will be its own small loss on top of the first one.

A child remembers a promise that did not come true. They remember it for years.

So you cannot promise the race. Good news: you were never meant to. There is something else to hand him, and it is better, and it is true whatever the stopwatch does tomorrow.

What you can honestly say

Start with what is actually keeping him awake, because it is not really the running.

It is being seen. It is a hundred people looking at him at once, in a vest, in a straight line, in an event specifically designed to sort children into an order. That is what a small person is lying there rehearsing: not the distance, the audience.

You cannot make the audience go away, and pretending it does not matter will simply cost you his trust, because to him it matters enormously. What you can do is change who is standing on that field first.

You are not required to promise anything about tomorrow. Exodus 33:14 says His presence goes with a person and gives them rest, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that going, not any forecast you make at bedtime.

My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.Exodus 33:14

Two things in that sentence, and children need them in that order. His presence goes. And what it gives, before anything else, is rest. Not victory, not a good result, not a promise about how the thing turns out. Rest, handed over the night before, to somebody who has to be up in the morning.

You have been given something better than a forecast to hand over. Scripture says the Lord goes ahead of His people into the place they are going, and the Holy Spirit is already out on that field while this room is still dark.

That is the note, and it is worth getting the wording right, because it is nearly the opposite of what dread does. Dread sends a child out ahead of themselves. All evening he has been running that race in his head, alone, at nine o'clock at night, in the dark, without any of the actual grass or the actual noise or the actual friends, which is the very worst possible version of it.

He is being the advance party. And he is seven, and it is not his job.

God gets there first. Tomorrow afternoon is not empty and waiting to be walked into. He is already at two o'clock, already on the field, already at the finish line and at the middle lane and at the bit where the grandads clap for everybody. Your son does not have to go on ahead tonight to check it is survivable.

You were never the one who had to make tomorrow go well, and neither is he. Psalm 121 says the Lord watches over your going out and your coming in, and it is His Spirit who keeps that watch at two in the afternoon as steadily as at nine at night.

Nothing is being measured tomorrow

There is one more thing, and it takes about eleven words, and a child will hold it for a very long time.

Nothing about him is on the line tomorrow. The race measures a distance and produces an order, and that is genuinely all it does. It does not measure whether he is loved, whether he is any good, or what God thinks of him, and there is no result that can adjust any of those by a single degree.

You are holding a child whose worth is not up for assessment tomorrow, whatever the stopwatch says. Scripture says the Lord does not look at the things people look at, and the Holy Spirit does not revise His view of a child at a finish line.

Say that as flatly as you can. It is not a consolation prize handed out in advance. It is the actual state of things, and it is just as true if he wins.