There Is Always A Child Asleep On Me

It has been six years and it has been four different children, and the timing has never once varied.

They go down about eight minutes into the last song. Every week. Whichever one is small at the time goes heavy against his shoulder with a fist in his collar, and about ninety seconds later the music drops and somebody says, if you want to come forward this morning, come forward.

He has never come forward. Not once in six years. There is a sleeping child on him and there is no version of standing up that does not end with the child awake and the row disrupted and his wife dealing with it.

So he sits. He is not annoyed about it. He knows exactly how short this season is, and he has been told a hundred times, and he agrees.

What he has not said to anybody is the thing that has settled underneath it: that he has come to think of himself as a man in a holding pattern. That whatever God has for him is queued up behind the small years, waiting until his arms are free, and that six years of Sundays have been six years of being the one who could not go.

If somebody is asleep on you when the invitation comes, sit down on the grass with us. Nothing about that invitation, or about anyone who answers it, is going to be criticized here.

A holding pattern is not what this is

Let us name the belief underneath the six years, because it is doing more damage than the arrangement it explains.

The belief is that this season is a waiting room. That the real dealings with God are scheduled for later, when the arms are free and the sleep is normal and a man can walk up an aisle like anybody else.

That belief is doing something specific: it is taking six years out of the account. Not out of God's account. Out of his, which is where he lives.

You are not in a queue behind your own children. Nothing about a season that pins your arms has ever pushed God's dealings with you into some later year. I am not saying that to make a tired man feel productive. The written word says he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and shall gently lead those that are with young (Isaiah 40:11), which puts the ones carrying small people in a named category and describes how He handles them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man with a fist in his collar.

The verse that names the ones carrying

Here is the part that changed this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who walks forward.

Read who is named in that verse, because there are three groups in it and the third one is easy to miss.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

The flock. The lambs, who get carried. And then those that are with young, which is the ones whose whole situation is that they have something small depending on them and cannot move at anybody else's speed.

He does not tell that third group to catch up. He does not schedule them for later. He gently leads them, at the pace their situation allows, and it is written down as the way He shepherds rather than as an exception He makes.

You are led at the speed your arms allow, and Scripture names your exact situation and describes His care for it. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a man on a Sunday with eight minutes left in the last song.

Nothing here is against going forward

Something has to be said plainly, or this becomes a comfortable reason never to move again.

The invitation is a good thing and the people who answer it are not putting on a show. Some of them have carried something heavy up that aisle and it cost them. What happens at the front is real, and when your arms are free, if you want to go, go, and this page will not put one thing in your way.

The relief is not that the front turned out not to matter.

You can ask from that seat with a child still on you, and asking there takes nothing off one person walking to the front. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him (Psalm 145:18), where nearness is His position rather than a distance a person has to close, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the aisle, who carries what a man asks.

And if these six years have cost more than the people on that grass know, if sleep has gone past the ordinary kind of gone, if a Sunday has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.