They were shelling beans on the steps and the child said it out of nowhere, the way they do.
Grandma. What is God?
Not who. What. Six years old and she went straight for the harder one without knowing she had.
And what came out was: God is love, sweetheart.
Which is in the Bible. Which is true. Which is about as true as a sentence can get, and the moment it left her mouth she felt something go wrong in her chest, and she has not been able to shake it since May.
Because the child said okay, and asked whether beans grow in the winter, and that was the end of it.
And she sat there on the step with a bowl in her lap thinking: I just handed that child a fridge magnet.
She is seventy-three. She has known God since she was nineteen and she has been through two bad decades and one very bad year, and what she knows about Him would not fit in this house. And a six year old asked her, on a porch, with nothing else going on, and she gave her three words that the child has almost certainly seen on a wall somewhere.
It was not wrong. That is what makes it worse. If she had said something wrong she could go and correct it.
She said something entirely true, and it came out so small that it felt, in her own mouth, like a lie.
God answered that question Himself and gave a sentence that will not sit still
Let me put the ordinary thing down first, because at seventy-three it is known already and it still needs saying to you rather than by you.
A six year old asked a question at the exact moment her hands were busy with beans and her mind was already halfway to winter. She got a true answer in three words that she will carry for sixty years without knowing she has it. That is not nothing. Most children never get asked and never ask.
Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: you did not lie to her. A true sentence does not become false because it is smaller than the thing it points at. That is not my kind reading of a bad afternoon, it is what stands written in Exodus, where a man asks God directly what to call Him and God gives an answer that deliberately refuses to be pinned down, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved that scene was on the porch with you.
Read what happens when the question is put to God Himself, by a man with a professional need for a straight answer.
God said to Moses, I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.Exodus 3:14
Moses asks for a name he can use in front of a crowd. What he is given is a sentence that does not close, and that is what is written, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed anybody a finished sentence about God.
It is not evasion. It is the most honest thing that could be said, and it is deliberately not the kind of answer that fits on a wall, and God does not apologize for it or expand on it.
So this is yours right now rather than pending a better afternoon: what you handed her was true, and its smallness is a property of language rather than a fault in you, because the written word shows God Himself answering that question in a way that will not sit still, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes three words go deeper in a child than a paragraph would.
Now here is the piece you actually missed on the step, and it is small and it will change every conversation you have from now on.
You gave her the true thing. You did not give her the other half.
The other half is one sentence long and it goes something like: and He is a great deal bigger than that, and I have known Him fifty-four years and I still cannot tell you the whole of it.
That is not a qualification and it does not weaken the first half. It is the part that tells a child that what she just received is a door and not a box. Without it, God is love is a fact she files. With it, God is love is an opening she can walk through for the rest of her life.
And the guard on this, because it matters at seventy-three as much as at nineteen: the mystery is never a reason to give a child fog. Say the plain true thing first, always, and say it with confidence. What is written is plain enough for a child and it is the ground she stands on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a plain sentence from a grandmother and turns it into something the child will still be unfolding when she is fifty.
So go and give her the other half.
Not a correction, because there is nothing to correct, and not a lecture. She is six. Wait until you are both doing something with your hands again, and say: do you remember when you asked me what God is, and I said He is love. That was true. And He is bigger than anything I can tell you, and I have known Him a very long time.
That is it. That is the whole thing. She will say okay and ask about something else, and it will go in anyway, because that is how it goes in at six. What is written is that these words are to be talked of when you sit in your house, and the Holy Spirit does the rest at that age.
And you have this to give her. It is already yours rather than something you have to prepare, because Scripture puts the unpinnable answer in God's own mouth and the Holy Spirit has been enlarging what you know of Him for fifty-four years, and none of that has to be sayable to be handed over.
Do the same with everybody else, while you are at it. Say the plain true thing and then say plainly that it is not the whole of it. Most people have only ever been given one of those two halves, and it is the second one that tells them there is somewhere to go.
Declare this over yourself
Then say these out loud. Know what they stand on: this authority is not yours by nature, it is Christ's, and in Christ it has been given to you, so you speak as one representing the King and not as a grandmother marking her own answers. Every line rests on what is already written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it, never the sound of your own voice. You speak under His will, never over it, and however He answers, the outcome is His.
- Feeling that I told her something false, you are not the judge of a true sentence. God answered that same question by giving a name that will not sit still, so smallness is a property of language and not a fault in what I said.
- Fear that fifty-four years came out as three words off a wall, get out, in the name of Jesus. What I handed her was a door and not a box, and I am going back to tell her which one it is.
- Lord, You are what You are, and I have known You since I was nineteen and I still cannot tell anybody the whole of it. I am going to say the plain true thing and then say out loud that it is not all of it, to her and to everybody after her.
Exodus 3:14
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