Why You Tell A Child About The Road

They moved in the third week of August, and Bellamy Road turned out to be the kind of street where cars come over the rise faster than they mean to.

Owen gave Immy four things in the first week. She was six. He did not sit her down and make a ceremony of it, because you cannot do that with a six-year-old and get anything but a performance back. He gave them to her one at a time, in the yard, while they were doing other things.

One. When you open the gate, you stop. Both feet. Then you look.

Two. There is a crack in the sidewalk two slabs down from the driveway. You know the one, it has the grass coming up out of it. You do not go past it toward the road unless a grown-up is with you.

Three. Crossing means hand. Every time, even if the street is empty, even if you are cross with me.

Four. If the ball goes out, you come and get me. You do not go after it. Not ever, not even a little bit.

She hated them.

She told him he had more rules than Nana had. She told him Sasha next door did not have any rules and Sasha was practically seven. In September she drew a picture at school of their house, and the house had a fence around the whole thing, thick brown crayon, corner to corner, and there is no fence on that property and there never has been.

Owen put the drawing on the refrigerator anyway, because you do, and he did not say anything about it. But he looked at it a lot that fall.

Then October, and here is what October looked like.

Immy out of the house at eight on a Saturday. Down to the Kowalczyk boys' driveway where the hoop is. Along to the storm drain at the corner where the frogs are in the spring, and back. The maple at the end that she is not tall enough to climb yet but goes and stands under anyway, with her hands on it, like she is checking on it. Up to the mailbox with the letters when he asks. She rode the whole block that month, over and over, standing on the pedals, hair everywhere.

The whole street.

And Owen stood in the yard one afternoon with a bag of leaves in his hand and watched her come around the corner at speed, and he did the arithmetic on the four sentences.

He had not given her a fence. He had given her a street.

Without those four things she would have been in the yard for three years. That is the honest truth of it. She would have been within eight feet of him every minute she was outside, because he loved her and the cars come over that rise, and there would have been no hoop and no frogs and no maple. Four sentences, one afternoon each, and the price of them was that she stopped at a gate.

She has no idea. She still tells people her dad has a lot of rules.

And I think you have a version of that fence drawn on your refrigerator, in thick brown crayon, corner to corner, over a house that has never had one.

Read the first line before you read the list

Here is a thing that has probably never been pointed out to you, and it takes four seconds and changes the sound of everything after it.

Before the commandments in Deuteronomy 5, before the first one, there is a sentence. It is not a preface anybody skips in a hurry. It is the ground the whole thing stands on.

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.Deuteronomy 5:6

They are out.

Read that before you read anything else. The people being addressed are already free. They are standing in a desert on the far side of a sea, with the country that owned them behind them and no way back, and God does not open by telling them how to earn it. He opens by naming what He has already done. The rescue is the preamble, and everything after the preamble is a Father talking to children who are already His.

You were brought out first. That is not a nice reading of the text, it is the order the text is written in, and His Spirit will not let you keep reading it backwards.

Which means the list is not a ladder. Nobody in that desert was climbing toward God. There was nothing left to qualify for. What was being handed to them was the other thing entirely, the thing Owen was handing Immy in the yard: here is how you live out here, so that you get to have out here.

The word we translate as law in those chapters carries the sense of teaching. Not statute. Teaching, the way a parent teaches, patiently, in the yard, one thing at a time while you are both doing something else. One of the psalms calls it sweeter than honey, and nobody in the history of the world has said that about a rulebook. That is the register His Spirit reads it to you in.

And then God says out loud what the whole thing is for, and He is not subtle about it.

You shall walk in all the way that the LORD your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you.Deuteronomy 5:33

That you may live. There is the purpose clause, sitting right there in the sentence, and it has been sitting there the whole time you have been reading that chapter as an audit. It is not that you may qualify. It is not that I may finally be satisfied with you. It is the exact thing a father says at a gate on a fast road, and it means the same thing.

You have a Father and not an examiner, and the difference is not a mood I am asking you to work up. It is written into the first line of the chapter, and the Spirit who moved on that line is the one who makes it sound like a voice instead of a document.

Now let me say plainly what I am not going to do, because you have been braced for it since the second paragraph.

I am not going to tell you which of these are yours to keep this year. That conversation is real, believers have carried it a long time, and it is not what is hurting you tonight and it is not the business of this page. You did not come here to be sorted into a camp. You came here because a voice in your head reads that list like a report card, and it turns out the voice has been doing an impression of somebody God is not.

So put the audit down. There is nothing here for you to fail. You are His already, on the far side of the sea, out of the house of slavery, and what is written promises His Spirit within you causing the walking, so even the learning is not being done alone.