When The Children Are Older

She has a thing she could say and she has had it for a while.

It is not a grievance and it is not a big idea. It is an observation about how something works, which she has because she is the one actually doing it, and she has watched a room go round the houses on it twice now while the answer sat in her chest.

Every time the moment comes, she puts it away again.

And the sentence she says to herself when she does it is always the same one. When the children are a bit older.

There are two other versions of it. When she has done more. When she is somebody in that room actually knows.

Her friend said something to her at this table about three weeks ago that has not left her alone.

She said, what exactly happens on that day?

And she laughed and said she did not know, and her friend let it go, because her friend is not the kind of person who pushes.

She has thought about it every day since.

Because when she went looking for the day, she could not find it. There is no threshold. The children get older continuously and there is no morning where they arrive at old enough. She will always have done less than somebody. And being somebody the room knows is a thing that happens to people who have spoken in it, which is a door with the handle on the inside.

She is thirty four, and she has been waiting for a date that does not exist, and she has only just noticed.

If you have filed yourself under later, sit down and have some toast. Nobody at this table needs you to be older.

What Paul told a young man in a room of older people

There is an instruction written to somebody in exactly your position, and the direction it points is the surprising part.

Let no man despise thy youth; but be thou an example of the believers, in word, in conversation, in charity, in spirit, in faith, in purity.1 Timothy 4:12

Read who is told to do what.

The young man is not told to wait. He is not told to earn standing, or to build up to it, or to be patient until the room comes round.

He is told to be the example. Now. In a room full of people considerably older than he is, and the list of things he is to be an example in is not a junior list.

And the first clause is the striking one. Let no man despise thy youth. That is addressed to Timothy about his own posture, not to the church about their manners. He is being told not to run his life as though his age disqualifies him.

You are being told not to let your own youth disqualify you, and the instruction is written to you rather than about you. 1 Timothy 4:12 puts let no man despise thy youth in the imperative to the young person and then hands him the example rather than the waiting room, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept in spirit inside that list of things a young believer is to model, which means the room was never the thing holding the gate.

The date that keeps moving

Now the day you could not find, because your friend asked the right question and it deserves a full answer.

There is no threshold, and the reason is worth seeing clearly.

Every condition set here is a moving one. Older is a continuum. Having done more is unbounded. Being known in a room is caused by speaking in it, so it cannot be a prerequisite for speaking in it without making the whole thing circular.

A date made of moving conditions is not a date. It is a way of always being about to.

You have been waiting on a condition that cannot arrive, and nothing in Scripture ever attaches a voice to an age. Jeremiah 1:7 has God saying say not, I am a child, for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and it is written as a direct correction of exactly that sentence, and it is the same Spirit who puts words in a person's mouth in the very next verse, which means the postponement was never coming from heaven.

What she has that the room does not

Here is the thing worth turning round, because it changes what she is carrying.

She has the observation because she is the one doing it.

That is not a smaller kind of knowledge than the kind you get by being in a room for twenty years. It is a different kind, and it is the kind that is missing from that room, which is precisely why they went round the houses twice.

You are holding something the room does not have, and holding it is not the same as being ready to be impressive. 1 Corinthians 12:21 says the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee, and it is written to correct a body that has started ranking its own parts, and it is the same Spirit who divides to every man severally as He will, which means what is in your chest at that table is not a junior version of anything.