Holding It Together for a Seven-Year-Old

The coloring book is the one from the box in the corner and it is missing most of its good colors, and they have been doing a parrot for twenty minutes.

Her daughter is seven. She keeps looking up. Not at the doors, at her mother's face, checking it the way children check a face, quickly and often, for the information adults will not give them.

So the face stays exactly as it is. Interested in the parrot. Mildly amused about the missing orange. Absolutely steady.

Underneath it, our reader is not steady at all.

She has been running the same loop for two hours and she cannot let one flicker of it reach the surface, because the moment it does the seven-year-old will know, and then there will be two frightened people in this room and only one of them will have anywhere to put it.

And a while ago she went to the toilets, and stood with her hands on the sink for about forty seconds, and came back with the face on.

That is your waiting room. That is your parrot. And I want to say something to you, because everybody in that building is being kind to the child and nobody has been kind to you.

The ones carrying somebody else

There is a verse in Isaiah about a shepherd, and the last clause of it is the one almost nobody quotes.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

Everybody knows the lambs being carried. Look at who else is in that sentence.

Those that are with young. The ewes. The ones who are themselves carrying something, who cannot be picked up and carried because they have their own weight to manage, and who therefore need something different: not to be lifted, but to be led gently, at a pace that accounts for what they are already holding.

That is a separate provision for a separate situation, and the situation is yours exactly.

You are being gently led while you carry her. Not overlooked because you are the capable one. The written word makes specific provision for the ones with somebody else's weight on them, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman doing a parrot in colored pencil rather than leaving it as a picture on a card.

Now let me say the thing nobody has said to you today.

Everybody has been lovely to your daughter. Somebody found her the book. Somebody crouched down to her level and used a bright voice. That is exactly right and you would not have it otherwise.

And you have been treated, all afternoon, as the piece of equipment that holds the child steady, because that is what you have made yourself into, competently, for two hours.

You are a person in this room and not only a container for her. The written word does not treat the ewe as scenery around the lamb. The Holy Spirit sees the woman holding the face, and He was in the toilets with you for those forty seconds.

And I am not going to tell you to let it out in front of her. You are right about that, and your instinct is good, and this page is not going to second-guess a mother's judgement about her own child.

You are allowed to be two things at once. Steady on the outside and in pieces underneath is not hypocrisy; it is what carrying somebody looks like. Gently lead assumes the ewe is still walking and still loaded. The Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to stop performing before He will come near.