The Hand On The Rail

Saturday morning at the pool and the noise comes off the water and hits the ceiling and comes back down on everybody at once. Whistles. Somebody's brother being told for the third time not to run. A smell of chlorine that gets into a coat and stays there until Wednesday.

Errol is on the bench by the wall with his granddaughter's towel over his arm and her shoes in a carrier bag. He has done this every Saturday for two years and he likes it more than he lets on.

In his coat pocket, folded into the lining where it has been for a while now, there is a small booklet somebody gave him. It has four steps in it. He has read it more than once, in good faith, because he is not a cynical man and he genuinely wants to honor God with his life. And every time he gets to the end of it he feels the same thing, which is not anger. It is a kind of tiredness. Step one, step two, and a result at the bottom. Put the right thing in the right way and something comes out. He has never been able to say out loud what bothers him about it, because everybody who ever handed him one of those was kind, and meant well, and was quoting the Bible while they did it.

Down in the shallow end there is a small girl who will not let go of the rail.

Both hands on it, knuckles white, chin up out of the water. Her dad is standing about a meter back with his arms out and he is not counting. He is not bargaining with her. He does not offer her anything at all. He says her name, and then he says the only thing he has to say, which is, "I have got you."

She looks at him for a long moment. Then she lets go, and she goes about eighteen inches, and he has her.

Errol watches all of it and something turns over in his chest, because nothing was put into anything. There was no slot. There was no step one. There was a man in the water saying a girl's name, and a girl who decided that the man in the water was who he had always been.

You want to honor God. That is the part nobody credits you with, and it is the truest thing about this whole business: it is not that you are looking for a way out of God, you are looking for a way in, and every road you have been shown has a mechanism at the end of it. Put in, get out. Do the thing, receive the thing. And you have tried, in good faith, more than once, and there is a tiredness in you that you have never been able to name without sounding ungrateful.

Nothing Goes Into A Father

Let me put the first thing where you can see it, because on this ground it settles everything that follows.

There is a place in Scripture where God invites people to test Him and see whether He is as good as He says. Read who is under examination in that sentence. It is God. He is the one offering Himself to be found true, and He is doing the offering because that is the sort of God He is. Nothing whatever is being required of you on this page. There is no request behind my back, and there is nothing at the bottom of this article with your name on it.

And when Jesus wanted to teach people how to come to God, He did not describe a system. He described a father, and He did it with two of the plainest objects in a kitchen.

"If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him."Luke 11:13

Look at what He compares God to. Not a mechanism. Not a scale. A tired, ordinary, imperfect dad, who would not dream of putting something horrible into his child's hand when the child asked for breakfast. And then the argument runs upwards, the way a Hebrew argument does. If that is what an average father is like, then what do you think the Father is like.

You are a child of God and not an operator of one. That is written into the plainest promise in the New Testament, and His Spirit is the very gift Jesus names in that verse, which tells you what the top item on the Father's list has always been. He does not hand out results in exchange for procedures. He hands over Himself.

Now here is the difference between a machine and a father, and it is worth having in your hands before you go anywhere near a hard week. A machine gives you exactly what you put in, converted. It gives you nothing else and it knows nothing about you. It does not know it is Saturday, or that you are frightened, or that this is the fourth time. A father knows all of that and the giving is not converted from anything, because it never came out of what you handed over. It came out of him.

And a machine can be operated by anybody. A father can only be trusted by his own.

"For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba! Father!"Romans 8:15

Read the mechanics of the cry there, because it is the opposite of a technique. The word Abba is not a password and it is not step one. It is what comes out of somebody who belongs, and the Spirit of God is named as the one who puts it in your mouth. Even the asking is a gift. You have been given the standing to speak to God as a child speaks to a father, and it is written into your adoption rather than earned through your performance.

That means the girl on the rail is a better picture of you than the booklet ever was. She has nothing to bring. Her arms are full of holding on. What her dad is asking for is not a contribution, and what he is offering is not a payout. He is asking her to let go of the metal and have him instead.

What You Can Actually Hand Him

So then, what does a person give a Father who cannot be operated? Something real. Something that costs you and is not a transaction, because it does not buy anything and was never meant to.

Saturday mornings. The thing you do best. The decision that has been turning over in you for six weeks. The temper that surfaces in the car. The worry about somebody you love, which you carry every night and have never once let go of for longer than an hour. That last one is the commonest thing anybody hands over, and it is the one that finds out fastest whether a person really believes they are dealing with a Father.

None of that is money and none of it goes anywhere near a ministry, including this one. You hand it to Him, in the room where you happen to be, out loud, and nothing is owed to you afterwards, which is exactly why it is trust rather than trade.

And if you find it hard, that is not a failure and I will not have it read as one. Nobody in that shallow end thought less of the girl for the two minutes she stayed on the rail. Her father did not go and get somebody more promising. He stood in the water with his arms out for as long as it took, and the standing there was itself the answer to her question.