I Am Afraid Of What A Playground Will Do

Let me name the wound before I say one word about lifting it.

Somewhere in this, somebody was called something. Not by their parents. On a field, or in a corridor, by a group, for about two years, and it worked, and the sound of it is still available in the memory at full volume decades later.

That is not a small thing and I am not going to move past it quickly.

Because here is what is actually happening with the list. Every name that comes up gets run through a machine. What could this be shortened to. What does it rhyme with. What happens if you change one letter. What would a group of nine year olds do with this on a wet Tuesday in the third week of term.

And every name fails, because every name can be made into something. That machine has no exit. It has never once returned a clean result and it never will, because the machine is not really about names.

The machine is a man trying to make sure his son does not stand where he stood.

That is love. I want that said plainly and first, because a person doing this usually thinks they are being neurotic, and they are not. They are standing guard.

But standing guard at a gate that does not exist yet, against people who have not been born, is a thing a body cannot keep up, and it has been going on since the spring.

He shall preserve thy going out

There is a psalm that ends with a sentence about exactly the thing being guarded here, and it does not do what a nervous father expects it to do.

The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. (Psalm 121:8, King James Version)

You are not the only one at that gate, and Psalm 121:8 has never once left a going out unattended. The written word puts the keeping on the Lord rather than on a parent's foresight, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man who has been standing watch since March.

Look at what the psalm actually names. Not the house. Not the years at home where a father can see everything. The going out and the coming in. The leaving and the returning. The exact hours that cannot be supervised.

That is the schoolyard, named in a psalm three thousand years before there was one.

The whole song is about a keeper who does not sleep, and the reason that image is in there at all is that the person singing it knew perfectly well they were going to sleep, and that their child would be somewhere they could not see.

You have been trying to do a job Scripture already assigned to somebody who does not sleep, and Psalm 121 says so in the plainest words it has. The Holy Spirit is what turns that from a nice line into a shoulder coming down two inches.

What the machine cannot know

Now let me be practical about the machine, because it feels like diligence and it is not producing anything.

The machine takes a name and generates a worst case. It is good at this. It has produced perhaps four hundred worst cases since the spring.

Here is what it cannot do. It cannot generate the friend. It cannot generate the teacher who says it correctly on day one and sets the tone for the room. It cannot generate the boy who decides at seven that he likes his own name, or the girl who says it in a certain way at nineteen, or the fact that most of the four hundred futures will simply never occur.

It produces one column of a very large ledger and then hands it over as if it were the whole account.

You are working from one column of a ledger, and no verse anywhere asked a father to forecast a childhood before he was allowed to name a child. Psalm 121:8 covers the going out from this time forth and evermore, and it is the Spirit of God who fills in the columns nobody can see from here.

And there is something else the machine cannot know, and this is the one that matters most.

Whatever happens on that field, in that corridor, with that group, has almost nothing to do with which word was chosen. A group that has decided to do that will find a way with any word at all. Hair, shoes, a way of running, a last name, a town. The name is not the door. It never was the door.

Which means the guarding has been aimed at the wrong thing for six months, and the actual protection is a different kind entirely.

You were never able to name a child out of reach of the world, and Scripture does not offer that as an option anywhere. What Psalm 121 offers instead is a keeper on the going out, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that better than a shield a father could build.

What actually protects him

So here is the useful thing, and it is not a name.

The protection is a boy who knows what his name means to the people at home. Not a word that cannot be twisted, because there is no such word. A boy who has heard his own name said with delight, in his own house, several thousand times, before anybody on a field ever gets a chance at it.

That is a real defense and it is the only one available, and it is entirely within reach.

Because the name is going to be said far more times in that house than in any schoolyard. Thousands more. Called up a staircase. Said at a table. Used in the middle of the night. That is the sound that gets laid down first and it goes deeper than anything a group can put on top of it.

You are able to build the thing that actually holds, and no name has ever once protected a child the way a house that says it well does. The Holy Spirit is the one at work in the coming in as well, and Psalm 121:8 promises the keeping of the going out.

So take the name that keeps getting crossed off, the one that survived every round until the machine got to it. Put it back. Not because the machine is wrong about what could be done with it, but because the machine was never the right instrument for this decision.

You have permission to choose from love rather than from a wet Tuesday that has not happened, and the written word set the keeping somewhere other than on your shoulders. The Spirit of God has the going out and the coming in, from this time forth.