Thursdays, half six to eight, on the field behind the leisure center, for eleven years now.
Most of them you see for a season or two and then they go to college or they get a girlfriend or they get bored, and that is fine, that is the job.
He was different and you knew it in the second week. Twelve years old, quick, no coat in November, and a look on him that you have seen before on lads from that particular kind of house. His father was known. Everybody on that field knew who his father was and nobody ever said it in front of him, including you.
He came for three years. Every Thursday, and Saturdays for the matches, and once on a Tuesday in the rain when there was no session on and he turned up anyway and the two of you did shooting practice for an hour and he did not talk and neither did you.
And at the end of every single session, when the others had gone and he was doing the thing he did with the cones because he never wanted to leave, you said a blessing over that boy out loud. Hand on the shoulder. Name first. Three years of it.
He stopped coming at fifteen. That happens and you knew it might.
You heard on Thursday. Somebody at the club, not unkindly, told you where he is and what it is about, and it is exactly, precisely, in detail, what his father was in trouble for.
He is nineteen.
The leaven was hidden and nobody watched it work
Sit on that bench a minute with the bag. I am not going to ask you what you could have done differently, because that question has been running since Thursday and it has not helped you once.
Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me being clever with a man on an empty field: you did not fail that boy. Nothing in this article is going to suggest that a different word, or more of them, or a proper conversation about his father, or keeping him past fifteen somehow, would have kept him out of it. Anybody who tells you that is guessing at a life they were not in, and what they are doing is making a nineteen year old's choices into a coach's report card, and God has never once done that.
Now come and look at the shortest parable Jesus told about how His kingdom actually moves.
The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened.Matthew 13:33
Two words in there do the work, and both of them are about visibility.
Hid. She does not sprinkle it on top where it can be inspected. She buries it, deliberately, in a quantity of meal so large that nothing can be seen for a long time.
Till. It carries on working through a period in which there is nothing to look at. That is the whole content of the picture: a process that is real, slow, invisible, and unavailable for checking, and Jesus chose it on purpose to describe how His kingdom gets into anything.
Three years of words went into a boy the way leaven goes into meal, and you were never going to be able to see it at nineteen or at any other particular moment. That is not me consoling a man with a bag of cones. That is what is written, and what the parable is a picture of, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a bench beside an empty field.
Here is what nobody explains to a man who works with young people. When you said those words over him, you were not installing anything. You were agreeing out loud with what God had already said about a boy He made. Your mouth was a door. God is the one who went through it, and He does not overrule a nineteen year old's will, and neither do you, and He has never once been obliged to show you what He put in there.
A blessing is not an input, and a young man's worst month is not its readout. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29), and the Spirit has never handed a coach a scoreboard. What was revealed to you was that a man speaks good over a boy who has nobody doing it. That you did, about a hundred and fifty times, on a cold field.
The score you are using
Now let me name what is actually happening in you since Thursday, because it is not grief and it is not guilt exactly.
The Spirit is not accusing you of anything in this, and neither is what is written. You have taken one month in a nineteen year old's life and made it the final score. Not deliberately. That is what news does: it arrives with the authority of an ending, and a mind that has been waiting three years for any information at all treats the first information it gets as the result.
His Spirit has never once treated a month as an ending. But he is nineteen. Nothing about a man is finished at nineteen, and you know that better than most people alive, because you have been on that field for eleven years and you have seen what twenty-four looks like for lads you had written off at seventeen.
That is not sentimentality and I will not dress it up as encouragement. It is a fact about the length of a life set against the length of a headline.
God did not appoint you to produce an outcome in that boy, and He has never once made a young man's choices the grade on the man who blessed him. It is written that every one of us shall give account of himself to God (Romans 14:12), which is God giving that lad his own file and giving you yours, and the same Spirit who breathed it is on this field tonight, which is why it lands as a ruling and not as a consolation.
Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you he will come out of it if you keep going, and I am not telling you he will not. I have no authority to promise you a young man's road and I will not trade it for three years of your Thursdays. What God does in him is His, entirely, and He is under no obligation to do it where you can see.
What I can put in your hands is this: a hundred and fifty blessings did not come back to God empty, and there is a nineteen year old in trouble tonight who has, somewhere in him, three years of a man saying good things over him with a hand on his shoulder. God's word does not come back to Him void (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and leaven hidden in meal does not stop working because somebody looked at the bowl and saw nothing.
So here is what is true on that bench, with the bag half full and the light going.
The blessing exists. God settled it in Christ before that boy was born, it is written down where anybody can go and read it, and the Holy Spirit carried every one of those Thursdays off that field. What is missing is not the words, and it is certainly not your faithfulness. There is no missing piece and there never was one.
You have been doing the only part that was ever yours, and you did it for three years for a boy who had nobody else doing it. Nobody has ever had to see a result in order for God to have received what was spoken. Faith is an open hand and not a performance, God is the one who fills the hand, and the Spirit does the carrying; what He carries is what is written.
I am not going to tell you what happens to that lad. That belongs to God, entirely, and it may take twenty years and a shape neither of us picks, and anybody who hands you a timetable is taking something from you. What I can tell you is what is already settled, because it is written and I am only reading it out where you can hear it: the leaven was hidden in three measures of meal, and it worked the whole time nobody could see it, and Jesus picked that picture on purpose.
You have got another sixteen of them on Thursday. Go and stand in the same place and do the same thing, and let His Spirit carry it.
Declare this over yourself
Say these standing on that field, out loud, because a blessing is spoken and not thought. You have the standing to say them, and not because three years produced something you can point at. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak God's word over that boy is His authority, handed to you and carried by His Spirit. Scripture says whoever speaks to the mountain and does not doubt shall have what he says. Says. Out loud. So say it here, to a piece of news that arrived on Thursday with the authority of an ending. What God does in that young man is His to decide, and none of it is yours to produce.
- News I got on Thursday about a boy of nineteen, you are true and you are not the end of his story or the verdict on mine. Scripture says the leaven was hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened, and God has never once let anybody watch that happen.
- Habit of taking one month and reading it as a final score, get off this field in the name of Jesus. It is written that every one of us shall give account of himself to God, and He gave that lad his own file and gave me mine.
- Lord, You went through that door about a hundred and fifty times with my hand on his shoulder. I thank You, because Your face is shining on a nineteen year old tonight and Your Spirit is the one carrying it, and I am standing at the edge of this box saying his name again.
Matthew 13:33
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