I Taught Them in the Car

The plan was a Thursday.

Dov was thirty-one when he decided it, and the children were four and two, and the plan was that every Thursday after dinner they would sit down and he would teach them properly. He had thought about it a good deal. He had a book he intended to work through.

They did it eleven times over about two years.

It was not that he did not care. It was that Thursday is a real evening in a real house, and somebody was always ill or late or in the bath, and by the fourth month he was carrying it around as a thing he was failing at, and by the second year he had stopped saying it out loud even to his wife.

The children are twenty-six and twenty-four now.

Both of them are in it. Not because of anything he did, he would say, and he says it often enough that his wife has told him to stop.

And in July the older one, on the phone about something else entirely, said a thing in passing that made him sit down on the stairs.

She said: you always used to say that thing in the car about how God is not embarrassed by us.

He does not remember saying it. He must have said it a hundred times. He has no memory of a single one of them.

And he has been on those stairs, mentally, ever since, because the eleven Thursdays are all he ever counted, and eleven is not much, and he has carried eleven for twenty years.

He is fifty-four.

And the sentence he has never said to anybody is that he thinks he gave them something loose and improvised when they deserved something structured, and that God covered it anyway, and that he is grateful and slightly ashamed at the same time.

And you may have your own version of the eleven Thursdays. And you may have been counting it for years.

The method is written down and it is not a Thursday

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

You did not improvise. You never did. Scripture prescribes a method for handing this to children, in detail, and it names the four places it happens, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a book worked through on a schedule, who plants anything in anybody. Set it down here on this step. It is heavy and it has eleven marks on it.

Now hear the actual instruction, and count the settings.

These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.Deuteronomy 6:6-7

Sit at home. Walk along the road. Lie down. Get up.

Four settings and not one of them is a scheduled session. Sitting, traveling, going to bed, waking up. Those are the seams of an ordinary day, and the instruction is to talk about it there, which is a description of transmission by continuous fragment.

And notice what comes first. On your hearts, then on the children. The order is deliberate and it means the material is meant to leak rather than be delivered.

You did the prescribed thing. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who fastened it into two people, and He has never once required a scheduled evening to do it.

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

Nothing here says structured teaching is a mistake. It is not. Sitting a family down is good and God has used it in a great many houses, and if the Thursdays had held they would have been a gift and Scripture would have no complaint about them.

And nothing here says the book on the shelf was vanity. It was not. Wanting to give your children more than you had is one of the better instincts a parent gets, and God gave you that instinct on purpose.

The point is only about the counting, and Scripture names four ordinary settings and puts the road among them, and His Spirit is the one who does the work in all four of them.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You cannot remember saying the sentence in the car.

That is not a failure of attention. It is what it looks like when something is on your heart rather than in your plan, because a man does not keep count of what he actually believes. His Spirit put it on your heart first, exactly as the order in that passage has it, and He has never once needed you to notice.