The Six Year Old Who Prays Better

There is a paper turkey still taped in her daughter's kitchen window and it is the middle of March.

Sunday dinner. The leaf is in the table so there are nine of them, which means two of the chairs do not match and nobody minds. Roast chicken, the good potatoes, a bowl of green beans that will go back to the refrigerator two thirds full. A booster seat strapped to a dining chair with the buckle hanging down. Somebody's phone face down by the salt. Her son in law is still standing up carving because he cannot ever get the second thigh off cleanly and refuses help.

They join hands around the table the way this family does. Her daughter says, honey, will you pray for us.

And the six year old prays.

No wobble. No throat clearing. He thanks God for the chicken and for Grandpa's knee getting better and for the boy at school who has been sad in the mornings, and he asks God to help that boy have a good week and then adds, out of nowhere, that God is nice for making dogs, and he means it entirely, and he says amen like a person closing a door he has closed a thousand times.

Everybody laughs about the dogs. The bowls start moving.

And she has her eyes open, because they never really close anymore during these, and she is doing what she does every Sunday at this exact moment, which is arithmetic. She is fifty seven. She came to this at forty nine. That is thirty one years of adulthood before, in which she was a decent person and a good mother and nowhere near any of this. Her daughter was already grown. Her grandchildren have never known her any other way, and they have never known themselves any other way either, and this child at six can talk to God in front of eight people more easily than she can in front of one.

She still writes hers down first. There is a spiral notebook in her purse in the hall with prayers in it in her handwriting, so that if she is ever asked she will have something. She has never once used it at this table. She passes when it comes around. She has passed for eight years.

The green beans reach her and she takes some she does not want.

You know the arithmetic. Yours might be twenty years or forty, a marriage, a career, a whole decade you can see from here. And you know the specific silence you keep at a table where everybody assumes you are fine, and the notebook, whatever your notebook is, that you carry so that nobody ever finds out how new you still feel.

What that verse actually says God is doing

Come and sit here on my side of the table for a minute, and let us look at something together, because that boy's prayer has been landing on you as a report card, and it is not one.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength, because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.Psalm 8:2

Read the verbs. God ordained it. That is deliberate, arranged, on purpose. Out of the mouth of babes, which is to say the smallest, least credentialed mouth in the room, chosen precisely for being that. And then the purpose clause, which is the part nobody quotes: that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.

Still. As in silence. That prayer was ordained strength, and it was aimed at an accusing voice.

You are sitting in front of the exact thing that psalm says God arranges, and it is not aimed at you. Psalm 8:2 says He ordains it to still an accuser, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient line and lands it in a dining room in March, where the accuser in question has been running arithmetic in a grandmother's head for eight years.

Jesus quoted this verse Himself, in the temple, when the chief priests were annoyed that children were shouting hosanna. He said, have ye never read, out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise (Matthew 21:16). He used a child's mouth as the argument. That is His pattern, and it has never once been His way of pointing out that somebody older in the room is behind.

I am not going to trade you a verse for your grief

Now let me stay right here with you, because there is something in this that people rush past and I will not.

Thirty one years is a real thing. It is not a technicality. You cannot go back and pray with your daughter when she was seven, and no sentence I say tonight makes that not so, and I am not going to hand you a tidy verse in exchange for it as though grief were a thing to be settled with a quotation. That would be a trade, and it would be a bad one, and you would be right never to forgive me for it.

Scripture does not rush people either. Paul writes plainly that he is the least of the apostles, not worthy to be called an apostle, because he persecuted the church of God (1 Corinthians 15:9). He wrote that as an old hand. He never dressed those years up. And then, in the very next breath and without erasing a word of it: but by the grace of God I am what I am (1 Corinthians 15:10). Both sentences, side by side, from one man, in one verse and the next.

You have permission to hold the loss and stay at the table at the same time, and neither one cancels the other. It is written by a man who never pretended his own history away, and the Spirit who inspired both halves of that sentence is not asking you to pick one, because He never asked Paul to.

And I will tell you what I am not going to promise. I am not going to tell you the years you have left will be made unusually fruitful to make up the difference, because God has not told me that and I will not invent a settlement in His name. What is in front of you is His, and it is enough that it is His.

A house has no junior members

Here is the thing that turns this table over, and it is very simple.

You have been sitting here as though there were seniority in this, as though the ones who came in at four are further in than the one who came in at forty nine. There is no such arrangement anywhere in the New Testament. Jesus told a story about workers hired at the third hour and the sixth and the ninth and the eleventh, and the ones who came at the eleventh hour were paid the same as the ones who had been there since morning, and the whole point of the story is the complaint of the people who thought there ought to be a difference (Matthew 20:1-16). The Spirit who preserved that parable for us did not preserve a seniority list alongside it.

And when the New Testament describes what people become, it uses one word for all of them. Children. Not senior and junior. Not tenured and provisional. Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God (1 John 3:1). Every letter in the book is addressed that way, to rooms full of people who had come in at every possible hour.

You were never going to be graded on fluency, and no verse anywhere sets a talking speed. His word measures none of this by how easily a person forms a sentence out loud, and the same Spirit who helps a six year old say something about dogs is the one Paul says helps our infirmities when we do not know what to pray as we ought (Romans 8:26).

That verse is not a consolation prize. Read it. He does not say the Spirit helps the eloquent. He says He helps in the not knowing. Which is the room you have been sitting in for eight years, and He has been in it.