He Asked What We Believe and I Started a List

The boy is eleven and he asked it while they were doing something else, which is when they always ask.

Dad, what do we believe?

Not a challenge. Not a test. A boy in the back of a truck on a Saturday with a genuine question about his own family, asked in the tone he uses for asking how far it is.

And Kimo said, good question, which is what a man says while he is buying time.

And then he started a list.

He is not proud of it and he can hear it now whenever he wants to, which is more often than he would like. He began with the thing about Scripture, because that seemed like the right foundation. Then the thing about the Table, which is important in their family and he wanted the boy to have it. Then something about how they do not put creeds above the Bible, which he realizes afterward is a statement about what they do not do rather than what they believe. Then a fourth thing, and he cannot honestly remember what the fourth thing was.

Somewhere around item four he looked in the mirror.

And the boy was looking out the window.

Not rudely. Not bored, exactly. It was the face a person makes when they have asked for one thing and are being handed a different thing, and they are too polite to stop you and too young to know what to say instead.

Kimo carried on for another sentence and then said something about the tide and they talked about that.

He is thirty-nine. He has been in that church since before he could walk, and he could recite the whole framework in the truck without slowing down, which is exactly what he did.

And what has stayed with him is not that he answered badly. It is that his son asked what they believe and he answered with what they are, and the two are not the same question, and an eleven year old could tell.

And you may know that mirror. Somebody may have asked you the small question and you may have started at the top of a list, and you may have seen their face go somewhere around item four.

Everything on that list is hanging on one thing

Let me take something off you before we go any further, because you have carried it since that truck and it was never yours.

You did not fail your son with four items. You never could. Scripture names one Person as the thing everything else is hanging on, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the quality of your answer in a truck, who puts anything into a boy. Set that down here on the rail. It is heavy and it has been in the mirror since Saturday.

Now hear the sentence, and hear what it says about arrangement.

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.Colossians 1:17

In Him all things hold together.

That is written into a passage about who Christ is, and it is not decoration. It is a load-bearing claim about how the whole arrangement works. Everything else that is true is true because of Him and is hanging on Him, and take Him out and the rest is a pile of items in a truck.

Which means your four items are not wrong. They are hanging.

And the boy asked, without knowing he was doing it, for the hook rather than the coats. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the holding together, and He was doing it in that truck while you were buying time.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says the four items are clutter or that a family should have no framework to hand a child. It should. The thing about the Table matters in your house and you were right to want him to have it, and a boy given nothing but a name and no shape around it will build his own shape out of whatever is lying about. Scripture gives shape as well as ground and His Spirit uses both.

That is what furniture is for, and your father chose some of it, and it is good.

And nothing here says you should stop teaching him the list. Teach it. He will need it.

The point is only the order, and that an eleven year old asked for the floor and got the furniture, and Scripture puts one Person under all of it and His Spirit is the one who keeps it standing.

Here is the plain part, and I will say it straight because you are a straight man. You did not stall because you did not know.

You stalled because the true answer is four seconds long and you have spent thirty-nine years in a room where four seconds does not feel like enough, and so the list came out on its own before you had chosen anything. His word is not measured by length and His Spirit is not impressed by inventory.