She Taught It Before She Needed It

She had a way of doing it with the twelve year olds that actually worked.

Six years of the same lesson, once a year, near the end of the spring term. She would not start with the trumpet, because the trumpet is where you lose them. She would start with the church at Thessalonica being frightened about their friends, and then she would ask the room who they were most frightened of losing, and there would be a silence about four seconds long that told her everything about which children were carrying what.

Then she would read it. Slowly. She never once got through verse eighteen without her voice doing something, and she never minded, and one year a boy at the back said, miss, are you crying, and she said yes and kept going, and that boy is twenty now and still remembers it.

Her mother died in January.

Since January she has not been able to get one line of that passage past her own throat. Not read it, not think it, not receive it. It sits there like a locked door with her own handwriting on it, because she has taught it, she knows the structure of it, she knows the Greek word for asleep and what it does and does not imply, and none of that is any use to her at all.

The worst version of the thought came in March and she has not said it to anybody. If it does not work on me, did I spend six years handing children something that does not work?

Sit down at the low table with the small chairs. Nothing here is going to test you on it.

It was never yours to dispense

Start with the thing that is doing the most damage, which is a role you did not choose and cannot get out of.

You have handled that passage as a teacher for six years. Which means that every time it came near you, the part of your mind that switched on was the part that asks how to say it to an eleven year old at the back who is worried about his grandfather. That is a good instinct and it built something in those children. It also trained you to meet those verses standing up, and now you need to meet them sitting down, and the muscle for that has not been used in a while.

That is not hypocrisy and it does not mean you were dispensing something you did not have. Scripture is not thinned out by being taught, and the Spirit who gave it does not withdraw it from the person who spent six years explaining it to children.

Here is the thing you handed those children, and it is worth reading as if you have never seen it.

For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 8:38

Notice the first item on the list. Death. It is at the very front, not buried in the middle, and everything after it is there to say that if that one cannot do it then none of the rest stand a chance.

So take it while sitting down. You are not separated from the love of God in January or in March or in any month since, and Romans 8:38 puts death at the head of the list of things that cannot manage it, and the Spirit did not write that verse for the teacher's copy only.

Locked doors and the reason for them

Now the locked door, because that is the actual experience and it needs naming honestly.

What happens when a text goes dead on a person who knows it well is almost never unbelief. It is proximity. The passage has been standing in a certain place in your mind for six years, filed under work, and grief has walked into the same building and now everything in there is too close to the fire to pick up.

Give it a minute. It comes back. It usually comes back in a different room and by a different door, and often in somebody else's voice rather than your own.

You are not disqualified from being comforted by something you have taught. Nothing written anywhere makes a person ineligible for a promise on the grounds that they explained it to children, and the Comforter is not standing back waiting to see whether you can manage it professionally first.

And the March thought, which needs answering plainly: no. You did not hand those children something that does not work. What is not working is your ability to receive this January, and those are two entirely different failures, and only one of them is even a failure.

Where it comes back from

Here is the practical part, and it is smaller than you expect.

It usually does not come back through study. That is the door you know and it is the one that is currently jammed. It tends to come back through somebody else saying it to you, badly, at an odd moment, when you are not braced, which happens often enough in Scripture that it should not surprise anybody, and the Spirit seems to prefer that route.

Which means the useful thing is not to try harder at the passage. It is to be somewhere a person can say a true thing to you. That is not a small ask for a woman who is always the one at the front of the low table, and it is the ask.

You are allowed to be on the receiving end. That is written into the whole design of the body of Christ, and the Spirit distributes what a church needs across a church so that no one person has to generate it alone.

And here is one more thing about those six years that you cannot see from inside January. A boy at the back is twenty now and remembers a woman whose voice went at verse eighteen. What he learned from that was not the doctrine of the resurrection. It was that a grown adult can hold a true thing and cry at the same time, and that is going to matter to him at some funeral of his own.