They Asked To Walk And I Said No

The no came out before you had thought about it.

They asked something small. Walking somewhere, going with somebody, doing a thing on their own that most people would consider ordinary.

And the no was already out. Not shouted, not unkind, just completely finished before any part of you had considered the actual question.

And then you spent the rest of the evening constructing reasons, which is the wrong order, and you know it is the wrong order, and the reasons were not bad reasons but none of them arrived first.

I am not going to tell you whether they are old enough. I have not met your child, I do not know that road, and a stranger issuing a readiness verdict about somebody else's household would be doing something no honest person should.

And I am not going to tell you the no was wrong. It may have been exactly right. What is worth looking at is that it arrived before you did.

He it is that doth go before thee

There is a sentence at the end of Deuteronomy said to somebody about to go somewhere without the person who had always led them.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed. (Deuteronomy 31:8, King James Version)

He it is that doth go before thee.

Before. Ahead of them on the road, arriving first, already at the place they have not reached yet.

That is not company on the journey, which would be a good thing on its own. It is somebody already at the far end of it before the walking starts.

You have a road that is already occupied ahead of them, and no part of it has ever once been unattended. Deuteronomy 31:8 says the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a house where a no came out too fast.

And it is said to Joshua, who is about to take over from Moses, in front of everybody. That matters here.

It is the exact moment somebody stops being led by the person who has always led them, and the word given at that moment is not about competence. It is about who is already down the road.

You are watching the moment the verse was actually written for, and it has never once been about whether anybody was ready. It is written in Deuteronomy 31:8 that he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who speaks at the handover rather than after it.

Where the no came from

Now let me name what happened in that half second, because it is worth being accurate.

The no did not come from a judgment about your child. There was no time for a judgment. It came from a picture, and the picture arrived fully formed, and it was a picture of something going wrong.

That picture is not a prediction and it is not discernment. It is what a parental imagination produces when it is handed a gap it cannot see into, and it produces the same thing for everybody.

You are watching an imagination fill a gap, and that has never once been the same as being shown something. It is written in Deuteronomy 31:8 that the LORD goes before, and the Spirit of God is the one who actually occupies the part of a road nobody can see.

And a picture that vivid gets treated as information, which is why the reasons come afterwards. They are not the cause. They are the explanation assembled around a thing that already happened.

Deuteronomy 31:8 fills the gap with a person rather than with reassurance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who occupies the part of the road nobody can see.

You are not looking at discernment, and a picture of something going wrong has never once been information about anything. Deuteronomy 31:8 puts somebody at the far end of the road, and the Holy Spirit is the one who fills a gap that an imagination was filling on its own.

And here is the plain thing, because the evening of assembling reasons turned into something.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence of a fearful or a controlling parent.

It is a fast picture and a slow set of reasons, in that order, which is the order those things always come in.

You have not been exposed as a fearful parent, and a no that arrived in half a second has never once been a report on you. The written word occupies the road ahead in Deuteronomy 31:8 rather than assessing the traveler, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to read a reflex as a character.

Fear not, neither be dismayed

One more thing about the last clause, because there are two words there and they are not the same.

Fear not, neither be dismayed.

Fear is the thing that happens in half a second in a hallway. Dismayed is a slower word. It means broken up, scattered, losing the shape of yourself over something.

The verse addresses both, which means it knows that the second one exists, and that it is what an evening of assembling reasons is made of.

Deuteronomy 31:8 names the slow one as well as the fast one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who speaks to a person at ten at night as well as at the moment of the question.

You are spoken to in the slow hours as well as the fast ones, and neither of those has ever once been outside the verse. Deuteronomy 31:8 says fear not, neither be dismayed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at ten in the evening while a person is still assembling reasons.