Teach Me To Have What You Have

The girl asked her on a Wednesday, in the side room, with the chairs still stacked.

Nineteen. Bright, and not sentimental, and not the kind who says things to be nice. She had been coming for about five months and she had watched, the way nineteen year olds watch, and she said it straight out with no run up at all.

I want what you have. Will you teach me?

And here is the week that girl picked. Monday, she had not prayed. Tuesday, she had opened her Bible and read the same paragraph four times and taken in none of it and closed it and been irritated about it. And on the Tuesday night she had said something to God in the kitchen, out loud, that she has not repeated to anybody and does not intend to.

So a girl with her whole life in front of her asked a woman with nothing in the tank to teach her how to have faith, and the woman said, of course, love, we will find a time.

She has not found a time. It has been three weeks.

You know this room. Somebody younger asked you to teach them a thing you were not currently able to do, and you said yes, and then you started avoiding the corridor.

Say what three weeks of avoiding has cost

Nobody has counted it. Let us.

It has cost the girl three weeks, which at nineteen and five months in is a long time to be waiting on a woman she trusted. It has cost her the corridor, which she now checks before she walks down.

And it has cost her something bigger and harder to see. Every week she does not go back to that girl, the gap between the woman she is and the woman she is thought to be gets one week wider, and a gap like that does not close by itself. It closes by somebody saying a true sentence out loud, or it stops being a gap and becomes a wall.

You have been avoiding a corridor over something God has never once held against you, and He has not withdrawn a single thing from you since Tuesday night. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it in a side room with the chairs stacked. What she said in the kitchen has not changed the arrangement.

The father in the crowd, and what he actually said

There is one line built for a woman who has been asked to teach faith on a week she has none.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.Mark 9:24

Read what that man is doing, because it is not what people think. He is not confessing a failure and being tolerated. He is bringing a mixed thing and saying so out loud, in front of a crowd, and there is no correction and no rebuke in the passage at all. He is answered.

That is not the low bar version of faith. That is the actual shape of it in the one place Scripture lets us hear a man say it plainly, and the same Spirit is the one who makes that a live word to a woman on a Wednesday rather than a famous half sentence.

You have the same faith you had before Tuesday, and it was never a substance you were managing the level of. That is not a comfortable reading of a hard verse. The written word puts the belief and the unbelief in one breath from the same mouth and calls the whole thing faith, and the Spirit is the one who makes that honest arrangement feel survivable.

And I want to be plain, because this site would be a cruelty otherwise. What you say to that girl is not a technique for discipling people. Nothing here is asking you to model vulnerability as a teaching method. What she does with a true sentence is hers, and the outcome was never your department.

What the true sentence sounds like to a nineteen year old

The constraints do not change because the room is a church. True. Short. And it must not put her on display, which here also means it must not hand a nineteen year old more than she can carry about an older woman she looks up to.

That rules out of course, love, we will find a time, which fails the first test three weeks running. It rules out telling her what Tuesday night was, which fails the third.

What is left is something like: I will, and I should tell you that this month I have had almost none of it, and that is part of what I would be teaching you. Or shorter: yes. And you have picked a bad month, and I am going to tell you about that too.

You are allowed to teach out of a month with nothing in it, and that is not disqualification, it is most of the curriculum. Mark 9:24 puts belief and unbelief in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing an older woman can hand a younger one without breaking her.

One plain sentence before we go on. If what got said in the kitchen on Tuesday came from somewhere darker, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, not the nineteen year old, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line first. That is not a disqualification from teaching anybody. That is what a true sentence is for, said to the right person.