Aisle Nine, Waiting to Pay

Two people ahead of them and one of them is doing coupons, so this is going to be a while.

Full cart. Thursday. Her daughter is ten and has been fairly patient for a supermarket trip that has gone twenty minutes longer than promised, and is now standing beside the cart doing nothing in particular, which is what a ten-year-old does in a line.

And her mother watches her eyes go up to the rack by the register.

I am not going to tell you what is on it. You have stood in that line. Whatever is at eye level in your store this month, it is there, at a child's eye height, arranged so that a person waiting has something to look at, which is the entire purpose of the placement.

Her eyes go up. They stay up for a second or two. And then they come down, and they go to the floor, and they stay there, and something in her posture changes in a way her mother notices immediately and could not describe to anybody.

Nothing happened. That is what makes it so hard to respond to. Nobody said anything. Nothing occurred that could be reported to a manager or discussed at a school. A ten-year-old looked at a rack for two seconds and then looked at the floor, and something got installed, and her mother saw it happen from about three feet away and there are two people ahead of them and one of them is doing coupons.

And she has, at most, ninety seconds.

And she runs through what she has and finds two options and hates both of them.

She can say something about it. Which turns two seconds into an event, tells a ten-year-old that her mother is worried about this, and hands her a subject to be self-conscious about for the next six years.

Or she can do what she usually does, which is to say something bright about the weekend and move them both along, and hope that two seconds does not stack up with the other two seconds from the week before and the one before that.

And there is a third thing she has never thought of, which is what this article is about.

And you know that line. You watched something land on a child in an ordinary place, and you had no move, and you have replayed the ninety seconds since.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not powerless in that line and you never were. Psalm 139:16 says His eyes saw that girl's substance before it was fashioned and every one of her days was written down, and the Holy Spirit is standing in aisle nine with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Four kinds of growing, and no anxiety in any of them

There is exactly one sentence in the whole Bible about Jesus between the ages of twelve and thirty, and it is worth everything to a mother in a checkout line.

And Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man.Luke 2:52

Eighteen years, one verse. And what Luke chose to record about all of it is four kinds of growing, listed together and without hierarchy.

Wisdom. That is the inside. Stature, which means physical growth, the body getting bigger. Favor with God, which is the vertical. Favor with man, which is the social one, the standing among people.

Now notice where stature is. It is in the list. Right there, second, alongside the other three, mentioned in the same breath and with the same verb, and there is not one word of anxiety attached to it anywhere in the sentence. A body growing up is recorded as one of the four ordinary tracks along which a life develops, and Luke puts it beside wisdom and favor with God as though all four belong together, which they do.

That is a startling thing to hold in a supermarket line, because everything at that rack is built on the opposite premise, which is that a body is the whole account, and everything in an anxious parent is built on the premise that a body is a danger zone, and the verse is quietly refusing both.

You are raising somebody who is growing along four tracks at once, and one of them was never a problem. The written word puts stature in a list with wisdom and favor and attaches no warning to it at all, which means the frame you have been handed by that rack is not the frame Scripture uses; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a checkout line with two people ahead and one of them doing coupons.

Why both of your options were bad

I want to be exact about the ninety seconds, because you were right that both moves fail and you should know why.

Saying something about it fails because it ratifies the subject. A ten-year-old who is told by her mother that this is something to be careful about has learned, first and most durably, that this is a subject her mother is anxious about, and children calibrate to a parent's anxiety far more precisely than to a parent's content.

Saying something bright about the weekend fails because it leaves the two seconds standing on their own, uncontested, and two seconds a week for six years is a curriculum.

The third thing, and it takes about eight seconds, is neither. It is to say something true about who she is, at some point in the next day or two, in a completely unrelated moment, with no reference to the rack or the line or anything that happened at all.

Not a response. A deposit. Made somewhere else entirely, so that it is not attached to a subject and cannot be argued with, and so that it is already in her when she is next standing in a line.

You were not out of moves, and the third one does not have to happen in aisle nine. Isaiah 44:3 says I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring, and the pouring is His action across a whole life rather than a parent's intervention at a critical moment; His Spirit is doing that pouring, and He is not scoring your ninety seconds.

And here is the second half, and it is the one that will let you sleep. You cannot get in front of all of it. There is no arrangement of a household, no route through a store, no rule and no filter and no conversation that prevents a girl from encountering the world's account of what she is for. Anybody selling you a way to prevent it is selling you something, and the attempt itself teaches a child that her mother is frightened.

You are not being asked to intercept anything, and nobody with any sense would ask you to. Isaiah 54:13 says all thy children shall be taught of the LORD, and great shall be the peace of thy children, and the teaching is put on Him rather than on the parent's vigilance; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who let you see her eyes go up from three feet away.

The deposit, not the response

Here is the practical shape, and it is the opposite of what instinct says.

Instinct says: respond now, in the moment, at the point of impact. Everything in you wants to do something in the ninety seconds.

But the moment of impact is the worst possible place to make a deposit, because anything said there is a reaction to what just happened and gets filed by a ten-year-old as being about that. Whereas a sentence said on Saturday morning while chopping something, with no rack anywhere and nothing having happened, arrives as a plain fact about her, unattached, and facts are far more durable than responses.

So do nothing in aisle nine. Pay for the groceries. Talk about the weekend if you want to.

And then on Saturday, in the middle of something ordinary, say one sentence about who she is and whose she is, in a normal voice, and then carry on with what you were doing.

You have a whole week of ordinary moments to make a deposit in, and none of them require you to be quick. Scripture says Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man, and the four grew together across eighteen unrecorded years rather than at a single decisive moment; the Holy Spirit is the one who has been with that girl in every line she has ever stood in.

So aisle nine is not the ground you have to hold. It is a checkout line with a full cart and a ten-year-old in it, and a mother who saw something and now has a whole week to answer it somewhere else.

And a word for you rather than for them. If what sits under this is heavier than a page can carry, find a real person this week. If it has gone darker than tired, call or text 988.