Twenty Children on a Carpet

The carpet is the round kind with the alphabet going all the way round the edge, and there is an unwritten law that the letter you sit on is yours for the duration and there is no arguing about it.

Thursday, half ten. Twenty of them, roughly, plus a handful of adults on the low chairs at the back with coats on their knees and one eye on the door.

She has done this for six years. She is very good at it, and being good at it is not a small thing: reading to twenty small people is a proper skill, and there is a page in the middle of the one with the flaps where she does a voice, and by now children who were here at two are here at four waiting for it.

There is a boy at the front who repeats the last word of every sentence about half a second after she says it, and she has learned to leave a gap for him.

And she is one of the least ashamed looking people in that building.

That is the thing about it. Nobody watching would guess anything. She is warm and easy and entirely present with twenty children on a Thursday morning.

And on her own, for years, she has been trying to construct something out of herself, and the thing she has been trying to construct is the feeling of being unashamed. She has gone about it honestly. She has counted up the good years and the good work and the six years of Thursdays, and none of it makes the feeling, and she has concluded that her materials are not sufficient.

They belong to what another person did, those materials. That is the whole difficulty and it is not her fault.

Sit on a low chair with me. Today I am speaking to you, the one carrying what somebody else did. I will not ask you what it was, and nothing here wants the thing itself.

And I will say the honest thing first: I am not going to promise you the feeling arrives today. What I will do is show you where Paul rests his.

Read what reason he gives

Paul writes a line about being unashamed in a letter from a prison near the end of his life, and the useful thing is not the claim. It is the reason he attaches to it.

For the which cause I also suffer these things: nevertheless I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day.2 Timothy 1:12

I am not ashamed: for I know whom I have believed.

Not: for I have lived well. Not: for my record stands up. Not: because I have counted the good years and they come out ahead.

The reason is an acquaintance. He knows a Person, and the whole weight of his unashamedness is on who that Person is rather than on anything about Paul, which is remarkable coming from a man with a great deal he could have cited on either side.

And notice the grammar of it. He does not say I know what I have believed. He says whom. It is a relationship word, not a doctrine word.

You are unashamed on the strength of Somebody you know, and you were never going to build it out of your own materials. I am not being generous with the text. The written word makes the reason a person rather than a record, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it onto a round carpet with the alphabet round the edge.

Committed unto him, which is a deposit word

Now the second half, because it says what happened to the thing she has been carrying.

That which I have committed unto him.

The word behind that is paratheke. It is a banking and legal term. It means a deposit: something valuable handed over to somebody trustworthy for safekeeping, with the understanding that the keeper is now responsible for it and the depositor is not.

And Paul says he is persuaded that God is able to keep it.

So what he has done with the thing that concerns him most is not resolve it, or explain it, or work it out. He has lodged it, and the keeping of it is now somebody else's competence, and his confidence is in the keeper rather than in the arrangement of his own affairs.

You are able to lodge the whole of it with Somebody competent to keep it, and you were never required to keep it yourself. Scripture uses a deposit word and puts the ability in God's name, and it is His Spirit, not a stronger sense of yourself, who makes a lodged thing feel lodged.