The Fourteen Minutes to School

Fourteen minutes each way, and he has done it since September, and it is the last week of May.

He worked out the number on a Tuesday for no reason at all. Fourteen minutes, five days a week, about thirty-six weeks. Something over forty hours. He has spent more than a working week alone in a car with his twelve-year-old daughter this year, and it is more time than he has spent alone with anybody except his wife, and considerably more than he has spent alone with his own father in the last decade.

And then, because he had started counting, he did the other thing. He tried to remember what they talk about.

Did you brush your teeth. Have you got your kit. Is that project the one that is due Thursday or the one that is due next Thursday. Your mother said to tell you about Saturday. Seat belt. Do you have money. Have you got money for the thing.

Logistics. Forty hours of logistics.

She is not unhappy in that car. That is not what this is. They laugh. The radio is on and they have arguments about it that are entirely enjoyable. She tells him things about her friends that he mostly cannot follow and he asks the right questions in the right places.

But he cannot find, in a whole school year, one occasion on which he said anything to that girl about who she is.

And the reason he cannot stop thinking about it is that she is twelve, and she is growing up inside a world that has an enormous amount to say to her about what she is for, and it is saying it all day, and it is confident, and it is everywhere. And her father has forty hours of her undivided attention a year and he has been using them to ask about a gym bag.

And he does not know what he is supposed to say instead. That is the honest problem. He is not a man who talks like that. He would not know how to start, and he is frightened of doing it wrong, and the fear of doing it badly has produced a year of doing nothing.

And you know that car. You want to hand a child something and you do not have the words for it, and you have quietly concluded that people who do this well are a different kind of person from you.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are the one with the standing to speak over that child, and you have had it the whole time. Psalm 127:3 says children are an heritage of the LORD, which puts them in the language of something entrusted rather than something produced, and the Holy Spirit is in this car with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

God wrote out the words

Here is the thing that solves the practical problem, and it has been sitting in the fourth book of the Bible the whole time.

There is a blessing in Numbers that God gives to Aaron, and what is remarkable about it is not its beauty. It is that God dictates it. He does not say bless the people. He says: on this wise ye shall bless, and then He gives the exact words.

The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: the LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: the LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.Numbers 6:24-26

Six lines. Fifteen words in the original. Somewhere between eight and twelve seconds to say out loud.

Now read it looking for what the person being blessed has to do. It is not there. Not one clause is conditional. There is no if in it, no when you, no as long as. Every single verb belongs to God: bless, keep, make His face shine, be gracious, lift up His countenance, give peace.

And notice the middle of it, because it is the heart of the whole thing for a girl growing up now. Make His face shine upon thee. Lift up His countenance upon thee. Both of those are images of somebody turning their face toward a person and being glad to see them. It is the opposite of being looked at as a thing. It is being looked at as a somebody, by God, with pleasure.

You have words that were dictated so that a person who is not good at this would not have to invent any. The written word records God giving the exact wording rather than the instruction alone, which means the problem you have been stuck on for a year was solved before anybody thought to ask; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a car on a school run in the last week of May.

Why you have not been able to start

I want to name what has actually stopped you, because it is not what you think.

You believe the obstacle is that you do not have the words. The obstacle is that you think it has to be spontaneous, and that anything scripted or borrowed would be fake, and that if you said something like this out loud in a car it would land as strange and effortful and she would feel it.

She might. The first time she almost certainly will.

But a blessing was never supposed to be spontaneous. This one is fifteen dictated words that priests said over people for centuries, identically, every time, and nobody thought it was less true for being the same words yesterday. Repetition is not the enemy of sincerity in a blessing. Repetition is the form.

You were not lacking words, and the requirement you set was never a real one. Deuteronomy 6:7 says thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and by the way is a phrase about ordinary travel; His Spirit is the one who has kept you in that car forty hours this year, and He is not grading your delivery.

And there is a second half. You are afraid of doing it badly, and the fear is not irrational, because a twelve-year-old can detect insincerity at a great distance. But she cannot detect awkwardness as insincerity. Children are considerably better at that distinction than adults are. A father who says something slightly stiff and clearly means it does not read as fake to his daughter. It reads as her father trying, which is a thing she will remember for fifty years.

You are not required to be smooth, and awkward has never once been the same thing as false. Isaiah 44:3 says I will pour my spirit upon thy seed, and my blessing upon thine offspring, and the pouring is His action rather than the parent's achievement; the same Spirit doing that pouring is the one who put the arithmetic in your head on a Tuesday for no reason.

Fourteen minutes is enormous

Here is what I want you to see about the number, because you have been reading it as an accusation and it is the opposite.

Forty hours a year, alone, with a twelve-year-old, in a small space, with no other adults present and no screens between you and no way for either of you to leave. There is not a person in that girl's life who has anything like that access. Not her teachers, not her friends, not anybody on any platform anywhere.

You have the best fourteen minutes in her day and you have had them all year.

And what you do with them from Monday does not have to be a program and does not have to be a conversation and does not have to happen every single morning. One sentence. Eight to twelve seconds. Said out loud, in a car, with the radio off for that bit.

You have the position and the access and now the words, and none of the three had to be earned. Scripture says on this wise ye shall bless the children, and then it gives the wording out, which is what somebody does when they intend the thing to actually get said; the Holy Spirit is the one who has you reading this in the last week of May with a summer in front of you.

So the car is not forty hours of logistics. It is the best fourteen minutes in a twelve-year-old's day, and a father with the standing to speak over her, and six lines that were written down so that a man who is not good at this would not have to be.

And if what sits under this for you, rather than for the child, is heavier than a page can carry, do not carry it by yourself. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix anything. If it has gone somewhere darker than tired, do not wait: in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.