I Bluffed My Own Daughter

It was a Tuesday, in the car, on the way back from her cousin's, and the question came out of nowhere the way they do.

She is fifteen. She asked it lightly, looking out of the window, in the deliberately casual voice a fifteen year old uses when something is not casual at all.

It was a real question. A good one. The kind that has been asked for two thousand years and has serious answers and also has a genuinely difficult edge that no serious person pretends is not there.

And she does not remember what she said.

She remembers the shape of it. She remembers that it was fluent, and that it had a little bit of warmth in it, and that it closed. It took about forty seconds and it landed like a lid going on a box.

She remembers her daughter said okay and then put her headphones back in.

That was six weeks ago.

Her daughter has not asked her anything since. Not about that, not about anything else in that territory. She is perfectly pleasant, they get on, there is no atmosphere in the house.

She has just gone somewhere else with her questions, and her mother knows exactly where, because everybody knows where, and it is a phone.

Ready, and gentle, in the same instruction

Let me name what you did in that car, because you have not let yourself say it plainly and you are going to need it said.

You did not lie to her. Nothing you said was false.

What you did was perform competence. You reached for the fluent version because the alternative was letting your fifteen year old see that her mother has not resolved everything, and you decided in about a second and a half that she needed a steady mother more than an honest one.

That decision was made out of love. It was still the wrong way round.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as instruction: you are not required to have it all sealed before you can answer your own child, and the verse everybody quotes about being ready has a second half that most people drop. That is not my kindness talking, it is what stands written in the third chapter of First Peter, and the same Holy Spirit who has been in that house since before she was born was in the car on Tuesday.

Read the whole thing, including the part that does not get quoted.

But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.1 Peter 3:15

Always be prepared to give an answer. That is the half you have heard four hundred times, and it is the half that made you bluff.

But do this with gentleness and respect.

Gentleness is not a tone you add afterwards. A gentle answer is one that leaves room for the person asking, and a lid does not leave room, and every fifteen year old alive can feel the difference between being answered and being closed.

Notice also what is being asked for: the reason for the hope that you have. Your reason. The one you actually hold. Not the strongest reason available in the literature.

So take this now rather than after you have studied up: you are equipped to answer your own daughter right now, because the written word asks for the reason you actually have and requires it to be given gently, and the Spirit of God is the one who put that question in a fifteen year old and let her ask you first.

And I will guard it, because there is a lazy version of this.

Nothing here says do not learn anything. Go and read, there are good answers to her question and you would enjoy having them, and there is no virtue in being unprepared.

What is written simply refuses to make preparation into a performance, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to be airtight before He works in a car on a Tuesday.