Ask Your Father, And He Will Tell You

He is twenty-three and he is her sister's grandson and he came up for the weekend on his own, which nobody in that family does.

He was good company. He fixed the gate without being asked and he ate two helpings and he did the thing young people do now where they ask you about yourself and then actually wait.

And on Sunday afternoon, on the steps, with the dog between them and the light going long across the yard, he said: Auntie, can I ask you something and you not take it wrong.

She said of course.

And he said: has anybody ever actually checked any of it? Like properly. Because I have been reading and I do not want to be rude but I cannot work out whether anyone ever did or whether we all just kept going.

She is seventy-eight years old.

She has been in that church since she was carried into it. She has buried a husband out of it and taught in it for thirty-one years and she has said the words at more gravesides than she can count.

And in seventy-eight years, nobody has ever asked her that.

Not once. Not one person. Not a child, not a stranger, not a single one of the hundreds of children she taught. And what she noticed, sitting on those steps with a dog and a boy who was being as careful as he knew how, was not offense.

It was something a great deal stranger. It was the feeling of being handed something and not being sure whether it was a gift or an accusation, and underneath that, faintly, the thought: why has it taken until now.

She said something about how people had looked into it a great deal over the years, and he said fair enough, and they talked about his job.

He went back Monday. He has messaged twice since, both times friendly.

And she has been out on those steps most afternoons since, on her own, thinking about it.

The asking was built in from the beginning

Let me say the plain thing first, because at seventy-eight plain is the least anybody owes you.

That was not rudeness and you did not take it as rudeness, and the small ache in it is not about him. It is about the seventy-eight years, and about a hundred children in a Sunday room, and about the fact that not one of them ever said out loud in front of you what that boy said on the steps.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: the asking was designed in. It is not a modern habit and it is not a sign that something has gone wrong with the young. That is not my kind framing of a Sunday afternoon, it is what stands written into the law itself, and the same Holy Spirit who put it there was on the porch with the two of you.

Read it, because it is an instruction and not a permission.

Remember the days of old; consider the generations long past. Ask your father and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you.Deuteronomy 32:7

Ask your father. Ask your elders.

That is not somebody permitting a question. That is somebody commanding one, in a song written to be memorized, aimed at a generation that had not seen what the previous one had seen.

So the whole thing was built with a handover in it. Somebody old is supposed to be asked, and somebody young is supposed to do the asking, and this is yours right now rather than pending your working out how to feel: what happened on those steps was the arrangement working, because the written word instructs it directly and the Spirit of God is the one who moved a young man to drive up for a weekend and ask an old woman a real question.

Now let me touch the harder thing, because you have been out on those steps for a fortnight and it is not the question keeping you there.

Nobody ever asked you.

Thirty-one years of teaching and hundreds of children and not one of them put it to you, and what that means, most likely, is that they did not think they could. Not because of you. Because of the shape of the room, and because a Sunday room is not built for a hand to go up and say did anybody check.

That is worth grieving a little and it is not your fault, and there is nothing in it that undoes thirty-one years.

And here is what to do with it, which is the only useful thing anybody can say about a fortnight of afternoons on a step. You have one now. One person has asked. What is written says the old are to be asked and does not say how many, and the Holy Spirit sent one, and one is enough to answer properly.