The Folder on Her Lap

The folder is a plain green one with a metal clasp, and the clasp has not shut properly in years.

She holds it flat on her lap on the 2:10 bus with both hands on top, because if she sets it beside her the felt board pieces slide out. A paper lamb with one ear bent. Six paper coats in six colors. The laminated verse card, curled from a summer in a hot car. Her lesson plan, photocopied, her own notes down the margin in pencil. The sun comes in low on her side, the ordinary gold of a Sunday afternoon in the fall, and mostly what it lights up is the dust on the glass.

This morning she taught eight year olds that a person must be born again.

Fifteen of them on carpet squares, and she did it well. She asked them what a baby does to get itself born, and they shouted nothing, and a boy in the second row said, you just get born, and she said yes. That is it. That is the whole thing. Then they went off with a paper lamb each, and she stacked the squares and walked to the stop, and the question came up her throat the way it always does, once the bus is moving.

What does it actually mean.

Not for them. For her. Six years she has taught this lesson. She said a sentence this morning that fifteen children now believe because she was the one who said it, and she could not tell you what it means, and there is exactly one person alive who could answer her, and it is the woman who trained her.

Her mother ran that class for thirty years. Her mother cut out the paper lamb. Her mother handed her the folder in the church kitchen the week she turned twenty two and said, you are ready for this, and hugged her hard enough that the clasp left a mark on her arm. And if she asked her mother what born again means, her mother would not hear a question. Her mother would hear thirty years hitting the floor.

So she holds the folder flat and looks at the dust on the window, and the bus takes her home.

You know the folder. Yours might be a class, or a title, or a name in a family, or just the plain fact that you are the one everybody else brings it to. And you know the question that stands up in your throat once you finally sit down, and the exact face of the person you cannot say it to, and how much you love them, which is the entire reason it has stayed there this long.

A verse with a line drawn down the middle of it

Sit with me a minute. Put the folder on the seat; the felt pieces will keep.

Near the end of Deuteronomy, Moses says one sentence to a nation standing at the edge of a country they have not entered yet. Hear it the way a teacher hears it. That is your seat in this room.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

There is a line drawn down the middle of that sentence, and God drew it Himself. On one side, the secret things, and they are His. On the other, the revealed things, and He says out loud whose they are: ours, and our children's, forever. Which is a promise with a carpet square and a paper lamb sitting inside it.

You have been standing on the revealed side of that line every Sunday for six years, and the half you have been handing out is the half God said belongs to you. That is not my encouragement, it is Deuteronomy 29:29, and the Holy Spirit who set the words and to our children into that line is not moving you off ground He named for you. He meant that half carried around in a green folder.

Now look at what fell on the other side. Jesus told Nicodemus what is over there, and He used the weather to do it: the wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, and you cannot tell where it comes from or where it goes, and so is everyone born of the Spirit (John 3:8). The mechanism. The hour. The invisible working of God inside a person. He keeps that side, and keeping a thing is not the same as hiding it.

You were never asked to trace the wind before you were allowed to teach what the wind does. John 3:8 hands a person the sound and withholds the map, and the Spirit who blows where He wishes has never made comprehension the price of entry into a room He is already in.

The teacher who came and asked anyway

Now let me put somebody on the bus with you, because Scripture puts him there.

A Pharisee named Nicodemus, whom John calls a ruler of the Jews. He was the one people brought their questions to. Somewhere in that city were men who had learned the text from his mouth, the way fifteen children learned a sentence from yours this morning. And he had a question he could not ask in daylight, so he did the only honest thing left to a man in his position: he came to Jesus by night.

I will not have him called a coward for the hour he picked. He came. That is the verb the record keeps, and he opened his mouth with honor, calling Jesus a teacher come from God.

And watch what it cost him. Jesus put one sharp thing to his face, in private: art thou a master of Israel, and knowest not these things? (John 3:10). It was never repeated to the council. Nicodemus keeps his seat, and later stands up in that same council to insist a man be given a fair hearing before he is judged (John 7:50-51), and at the end he carries seventy five pounds of spices to a tomb in broad daylight (John 19:39). His question was answered and his standing was left with him, whole.

You have a place to bring the thing you cannot say at your mother's kitchen table, and it is not a place that carries anything back to her. That night visit was written down and kept two thousand years so a reader would know the door is open at that hour, and it is His Spirit, not my warmth, who takes a page like that and turns it into a bus seat with the sun coming in low.

And hear the tenderness in why yours is stuck. You are not protecting your reputation. You are protecting your mother. The question is lodged in your throat by love, not by shame, and love is a far better reason than the one you have been accusing yourself of. Bringing it to God is not going behind her back. She handed you a folder that was always meant to open.

What you already told the boy in the second row

Here is the answer you handed out this morning without noticing it was also yours.

They shouted nothing, and the boy in the second row said, you just get born. That child said the doctrine. Read John and see whether he missed anything.

But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.John 1:12-13

Not of blood: it does not come down a family line, however many generations of that class your mother taught. Not of the will of the flesh: no effort produces it. Not of the will of man: nobody else can perform it on you, not a preacher and not a mother. But of God. Peter says it from another angle, born again not of corruptible seed but by the word of God which lives and abides forever (1 Peter 1:23), and Paul writes to Titus of the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5).

You have the whole revealed half in your own folder already, in a sentence eight year olds can shout across a room. John 1:13 says of God, 1 Peter 1:23 says by the word, Titus 3:5 says the Holy Spirit does the renewing, and each of those sits on the side of the line God handed over to us and to our children. What is new is a birth. Whose work it is, is God's. That is the answer, and you have been teaching it accurately for six years.