My Children Asked And I Said No

They asked you on a Saturday.

It was not a big request. One of them had seen something somewhere, and they came in with that particular energy children have when a thing has just occurred to them, and they asked if you could all plant something.

And you said no.

You did not say it unkindly. You said something reasonable about the time of year, or the state of the yard, or how you had things to do. And they said all right, in the easy way children say all right when a thing has not cost them much, and they went off and did something else.

And you have been carrying that Saturday around for four months.

Because you know what it was. It was not about the time of year.

You said no because you have lost things before, and you did not want to stand out there with two children watching something you planted fail to come up.

You are able to say yes to them this week, and one refusal has never once been the last word a father gets.

That is the whole of it, and it is not a small thing, and I am not going to treat it as one. You protected yourself in a moment when they were asking you for something, and you have known it ever since, and it sits in you at odd hours.

Restore the years

There is a promise in Joel that people quote for large disasters, and I want to bring it down to the size of a Saturday.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. (Joel 2:25, King James Version)

I will restore to you the years.

Not the crop. The years. That is the thing worth noticing, because a crop is a season and years are a life, and the verse deliberately goes for the larger of the two.

You are inside a promise that goes after time itself, and lost stretches of a life have never once been outside what God said He would restore. Joel 2:25 names years rather than a harvest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a verse about locusts land on a man thinking about one Saturday afternoon.

Now, notice who does the restoring in that sentence.

I will restore. Not you will recover. Not you will make it up to them. The subject of the verb is God, and the object is you, and there is no instruction anywhere in that line for the person being restored.

That matters here, because your instinct is going to be to fix it, and to fix it largely, and to fix it in a way that makes up for four months.

You have not been handed the job of restoring anything, and a father's failure of nerve has never once been something he had to repay before God would move on it. The Holy Spirit is the one who does the restoring while a man is still working out what he did, and the written word puts the verb firmly on God's side of the sentence.

And there is one more thing in there that I do not want you to miss.

My great army which I sent among you. He does not distance Himself from the hard years. He does not pretend they happened while He was elsewhere. He owns the whole of it and then restores it anyway, which is a much sturdier comfort than a God who was merely absent.

You are dealing with somebody who does not need the record edited before He restores it, and an honest account of a Saturday has never once been too much for Him to hold. The word calls the locusts His own great army and then promises the years back regardless, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a man tell the truth about a moment without losing anything by it.

Say yes, and then get out of the way

So let me be practical about the yes, because there is a wrong way to do it and you will find it naturally.

The wrong way is to make it an occasion.

You will be tempted to plan it, to buy the right things, to pick a good weekend, to look up what grows well and to do it properly so that it works. That instinct is the same instinct that said no in the first place, wearing better clothes. It is still trying to control the outcome, and it will still be standing out there hoping.

Say yes this week. Use whatever is around. Let it be a Tuesday.

You are free to do this badly and on a weekday, and a thing done small has never once meant less to a child than a thing done properly. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in an unplanned half hour, and Joel 2:25 promises years back without asking anybody to organize the restoration first.

And then the harder half. Let them do it.

Let them put the seeds in too deep. Let them water it far too much. Let one of them lose interest after four minutes and go and do something else, because that is what children are like and it is not a verdict on the afternoon.

Your hands stay off it as much as you can bear.

Because here is what they are actually asking for, and it was never a plant. They are asking to do something alongside you. The seed is a pretext. If it comes up, wonderful. If it does not, they will remember a Tuesday when their father crouched down in the dirt with them.

You are giving them the thing they came for the moment you say yes, and what happens in the soil afterward has never once been the part they were asking about. The Spirit of God is the one who is in a half hour on a weekday, and the written word is concerned with restored years rather than with results.

What they will remember

I want to say something about how children keep a day like this, because there is a wrong assumption still running underneath it.

You think the risk is that it fails and they see you fail.

They will not read it that way. A child does not stand in a yard evaluating a father's competence with seeds. That is an adult activity, and it has been running in you for years.

What a child registers is whether the answer was yes.

You were never being assessed out there by the two people you were most worried about, and a child watching a father has never once been keeping the kind of score a man keeps on himself. Joel 2:25 is God restoring years to people who had every reason to feel they had wasted them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man what his children are actually looking at.

And if nothing comes up, you get to do the most useful thing a father can do in front of a child, which is to lose something small without it meaning anything.

They will watch how you take it. That is the real lesson of the afternoon and it has nothing to do with growing.

You are able to show them a loss that costs nobody anything, and a plant that failed has never once had to become a story about what your family is like. The Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a man in front of his own children, and the word promises the years and says nothing at all about a guarantee on the season.