I Read Until I Could Not Say It

Her goddaughter is nine and asked in the car, and the car is where it always happens.

Auntie Sorcha, is God nice?

That is the whole question. Nine years old, looking out the window, entirely genuine.

And Sorcha started with, well, that depends a bit on what we mean by nice.

She heard it leave her mouth. She has heard herself do a version of this perhaps two hundred times in the last decade and she still could not stop it, and she went on to say something about how the word nice has narrowed over time and that the older sense had more in it, which is true, and which was not what a nine year old wanted at half past four on a wet Tuesday.

The child said okay and asked whether they could stop for chips.

Sorcha has been reading seriously since she was twenty-six. Church history first, then the harder end of it, then some of the languages badly, then eleven years of everything else. She is not a show-off about it and almost nobody in her life knows the half of what she has read.

What it has given her is real. She sees the shape of things now. She can hear when somebody is repeating a slogan and she knows why the slogan started and what it was correcting and what it broke.

What it has taken, and she did not see this being taken, is her ability to finish a plain sentence.

Every statement she makes about God now comes with three qualifications welded onto it. Not to be clever. To be accurate, because she has read enough to know how each simple form of the sentence has been misused and by whom, and the qualifications are her way of not being one more person who says it carelessly.

And the result is that a nine year old asked her the biggest question anybody has ever asked her and got a note on lexical drift.

She is thirty-seven. She said the words is God nice out loud in the empty car on the way back and could not get to the end of an answer even alone, with nobody to protect.

And you may know that car. You may be a careful person, and your care may have quietly become an inability, and you may only have noticed because a child asked you something plain.

Scripture quotes a short hymn and does not qualify it

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it for eleven years and it was never yours.

You are not obliged to protect God from a simple sentence. You never were. Scripture itself breaks into a short hymn and lets it stand without a single clause of defense, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the precision of your framing, who keeps a thing true. Set it down here on the table. It is heavy and it has been in the passenger seat since Tuesday.

Now hear it, and notice how it behaves.

In the middle of a letter full of careful instruction, about qualifications and conduct and order, the writer stops mid-argument and quotes something the churches were already singing.

Beyond all question, the mystery from which true godliness springs is great: He appeared in the flesh, was vindicated by the Spirit, was seen by angels, was preached among the nations, was believed on in the world, was taken up in glory.1 Timothy 3:16

Six short lines. No qualifications. No footnote about how any of them could be misread, and every one of them could be, and the man writing knew that better than you do.

And look at the phrase he opens with: beyond all question. He is not saying nobody could raise one. He is saying that this is where the raising of them stops.

That confession is yours to say the same way. Right now, at thirty-seven, in a wet car with a bag of chips going cold. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who vindicated it in the first place, and He has never once needed your clauses to hold it steady.

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 eleven years were vanity or that careful reading makes a person worse. It does not. You can hear a slogan for what it is and you know what it was correcting, and that is a genuine gift and a service, and the people around you are better off for it whether they know it or not, and Scripture honors careful work and His Spirit has used yours.

That is what good furniture is. It is real and it is worth having and somebody made it at cost.

And nothing here is telling you to stop reading or to start saying things loosely. Loose talk about God is not humility, it is just cheaper, and you were right to want to avoid it.

The point is only that a qualification is a servant, and yours have become the household, and a nine year old found the door blocked. Scripture puts one short hymn in the middle of a careful letter and lets it stand, and His Spirit is the one holding it up.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The three clauses are not pride.

They are a woman who has seen how much damage a careless sentence does and has decided never to be the person who does it, and that decision has cost her the ability to answer a child. His Spirit is not embarrassed by any of it and He was in the car.