A Rusk at Soft Play

The rusk goes soft at one end almost immediately, and the baby holds it in both fists like something precious and gums it with total concentration, and half of it ends up on his sleeve.

Saturday morning at soft play is a wall of sound. Somewhere in the padded tubes above him his four year old is shrieking with a friend she made forty seconds ago, and the ball pit is a permanent riot, and a woman at the next table is trying to drink a coffee with a toddler on her lap and losing. He sits on the plastic bench with the baby on his knee, and his phone buzzes on the table, face up, and it is the men's group. Morning lads. Quick one before Tuesday. Where is everybody at in their walk right now, honestly, one line each.

He reads it twice. Then he watches the baby with the rusk.

He has been a Christian for twenty two years. He can say that with a date attached and he does not need the date. And here is his one line, honestly: he still cannot pray out loud in a room with other men. He still loses his temper in traffic. He still reads the same three chapters of the Gospels because those are the ones he understands, and the men in the group talk about what God is doing in them this season and he sits there thinking, I do not have seasons, I have the same Tuesday over and over. Twenty two years and he feels like a man who has been at the same table with the same plate for a very long time while everybody else went up for seconds.

The baby drops the rusk. He picks it up, checks it, hands it back, and the baby takes it as if it were new, and it hits him, sitting there in the noise: nobody in this building is going to say the baby is behind. She is fed at her size. Somebody bends down and gives her what she can hold. Nobody has a chart out.

That bench is yours. You know your one line, and you have been not typing it for years. Stay with me. I want to show you the God who bends down.

He bent down and fed them

Here is the first thing, and it is a matter of what God says about His own way with a growing child before it is a matter of comfort. In Hosea, God speaks about His people the way a parent speaks about a small child in the kitchen, and He is not describing a fast child:

Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk; I took them up by their arms, but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of kindness, with the bands of love, and I became to them as one who eases the yoke on their jaws, and I bent down to them and fed them.Hosea 11:3-4

I taught him to walk. I took him by the arms. I bent down and fed him. That is God, describing Himself, and the picture is a parent on the kitchen floor with a toddler who falls over every third step. Nobody teaches a child to walk by shouting from the doorway. You get down. You take them by the arms. You feed them what they can hold, at the height they actually are, and you are not surprised when they fall, and you are not impatient with the falling, because the falling is what walking looks like at that age.

You are the child in that verse, held by the arms by the God who bends down, and He is not standing in the doorway with a chart. I am not softening a hard God for you. I am reading you what is written about how He feeds, and it is His Spirit who takes a sentence from Hosea and makes it a hand under a man's elbow at soft play.

The chart on the wall was never His

Now let us name the thing actually being carried on that bench, because you deserve to hear it said back to you plainly. It is not that nothing is growing. It is that somewhere along the twenty two years a chart went up on the wall, the kind with the ages down the side and the heights across, and every time a man in the group says what God is doing in him this season you stand yourself against it and come up short. And underneath that, quieter, is the thought that a growing thing which has grown this little must not be alive, and that God has been looking at your one line for years and is tired.

I want to tell you as a woman who has kept watch through a great many slow nights: God did not draw that chart. There is not one verse in the whole of Scripture in which He measures His children against each other, and there are a great many in which He measures the child against nothing but His own patience. Paul says one man planted and another watered and God gave the growth. Not the planter and not the waterer, and not the plant by straining. He gave it. And Jesus said the seed grows while the farmer sleeps, and the man does not know how. Nobody is asked to know how. The child is asked to eat.

Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good.1 Peter 2:2-3

You have milk, at your size, and the God who gives it has never once looked at a nursing child and called it slow. The word says long for it, and it does not say catch up; and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the growing in you, at a rate He chose and has not once complained about. The chart on the wall is not His handwriting. Take it down.

Growing at the age you actually are

David wrote a psalm that is three verses long, and it is the psalm of a man who has stopped straining. He says he has calmed and quieted his soul like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me. A weaned child. Not a champion. Not a man who has arrived. A small child who has stopped fretting for what it cannot reach and is sitting on its mother's lap being exactly the age it is, and that is what David calls a quieted soul.

Hear me. Growth in Christ is not a race between the men in your group. It is a child being fed by a parent who bends down, and it happens at the age you actually are and not the age you think you should be by now. Twenty two years is not a verdict. It is a number, and God is not embarrassed by it, and He did not put a deadline on walking. If you came late, you came, and a late arrival is not a lesser one. If you have been in it since before you can remember, you were fed all that time, and a lifelong one is not a suspect one. Neither man is behind. There is no behind. There is a Father on the kitchen floor with His arms out.

You were never asked to grow faster than He feeds you, and He feeds you at the pace He set, which is His and not the group's. Scripture calls it milk and it calls it being led with cords of kindness, and the Spirit who leads by cords is not the kind of leader who yanks. So sit down at the size you are. Take the rusk. It is not a smaller love because it is a smaller portion. It is the portion of a God who knows exactly what your hands can hold.