So the Next Generation Would Know

She has never once told a child of hers anything about God, and she would be genuinely surprised to be told that this is odd.

She is not a shy woman. She has been going to the same chapel for fifty-one years and she is on the flower rota and she has an opinion about most things. If you asked her whether she believed, she would look at you as though you had asked whether she had a kettle.

But there is a division of labor in her head that she has never inspected, and it goes like this.

The minister does the telling. He has been to a college, he knows what he is doing, and there is a service on a Sunday designed precisely for the purpose. Her job is to get the children there, feed them afterwards, and be the sort of woman whose life does not contradict what they were told.

She has done all three of those for five decades without fail.

And her grandchildren are eleven and eight and nine hundred miles are between them and any chapel she has ever been in, because their parents moved, and they are lovely and busy and they do not go anywhere on a Sunday.

She has never worked out what to do about that, because in her arrangement there is no job for her in it. She is the one who gets them there, and she cannot get them anywhere from here, and so the whole thing has quietly gone into the category of things she prays about and cannot affect.

Read who is given the job

That the generation to come might know them, even the children which should be born; who should arise and declare them to their children (Psalm 78:6).

That verse is in the middle of a passage about a whole nation's memory, and the striking thing about it is where the work is put.

Not on a priest. Not on a teacher. On fathers, and on households, and on ordinary people who arise and declare things to their children.

The whole psalm is a plain instruction that the memory of what God did travels through families, in ordinary conversation, from one generation to another, and the professional class is nowhere in the sentence.

You have been given a job in this and you have never once done it. That is where the psalm puts the work, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old instruction into an actual conversation in a kitchen, because Scripture says He brings things to remembrance, which is exactly what an old woman needs in the middle of a sentence to a child.

Where the division of labor came from

Let me say something gentle about how you got here, because it is not a failure and half your chapel is the same.

You grew up in a world with clear roles. The minister did the telling and the household did the living, and it worked, and for about eighty years in your part of the world it worked very well, because everybody's grandchildren were in the building on a Sunday anyway.

The arrangement did not fail because it was wrong. It failed because the second half of it stopped happening. The children are not in the building, and no professional in the world can tell somebody who is nine hundred miles away and not in the room.

So the job has come back to where the psalm always had it, which is you.

You are the one in the room with them and the psalm always assumed that was where this happens. The word puts the declaring in the mouths of ordinary people in households, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives an eleven-year-old ears for something said by their grandmother while rolling pastry, which is not a thing a service can do from nine hundred miles away.

One true thing, said sideways

Now the practical part, because you will do this if it is small and you will not do it if it sounds like a program.

You are not going to teach them anything. Do not sit anybody down. An eleven-year-old sat down for a talk about God by a grandmother he loves will be polite and will remember nothing.

You are going to tell them one true thing, in the middle of something else, in your ordinary voice, and then carry on with what you were doing.

Something God actually did. In your life, with a date if it has one, said in about two sentences while your hands are busy. The busyness is not incidental; a child receives a thing far better sideways than face on, which is why every important conversation you ever had with your own mother happened while she was doing something else.

You are able to do this while rolling pastry and it counts. Scripture says these words shall be in thine heart and thou shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house and when thou walkest by the way (Deuteronomy 6:6 and 7), which is a description of ordinary conversation and not of a lesson, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes something said sideways land in a child.

And I will keep it plain, because you would not stand for anything else. Nothing here promises what those two do at twenty. That is God's and it is theirs and I will not sell it to you. What is settled is where the psalm puts the job, and you can do your part of it in about forty seconds on Saturday with flour on your hands.