Nineteen Is Not A Waiting Room

Nobody has ever said it to her outright. That is what makes it hard to argue with.

Nobody has stood in front of her and said you are too young for God to use. If anybody had, she would have had something to push against, and she is a person who pushes.

Instead it arrives in pieces. A hundred small pieces over about six years.

You have got plenty of time.

When you have lived a bit more.

It is lovely to see young people so keen.

Keen. That is the word that does it. Nobody says keen about a forty-year-old. Keen is what you say about a puppy in a kitchen, warmly, while you move the good vase.

She is nineteen. She has read her Bible through twice, which is twice more than most of the adults saying these things. She prays for her friends by name every morning on the bus. Last month a girl in her block told her about something that had happened to her, something serious, and asked her what to do, because there was nobody else and because she trusted her.

And when she got home from that conversation, shaking, the thought that arrived was not God used me tonight.

It was: I hope I did not do that wrong. I should have got a proper adult.

Now put her down a second, and let me ask you the question, whatever age you are as you read this.

Who taught you that you were a placeholder until you got older?

Paul wrote a sentence to a young man being managed

There is a line in a letter that gets quoted at youth events, usually with the volume up, and I want to read it to you quietly instead, because quiet is how it was written.

Paul is writing to Timothy, who is in charge of a difficult church, and who is young, and who is finding that people are handling him gently in the way people handle the young.

Do not let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity.1 Timothy 4:12

Look at what Paul does not say. He does not say prove yourself. He does not say earn their respect and then you will be taken seriously. Both of those are what the world says, and Paul knew both of them and used neither.

He says: do not let them.

Which puts the whole thing somewhere surprising. The instruction is not to the church about how to treat young people. It is to the young person about what to accept.

And then look at the promise this house stands on, and notice the order.

Your sons and your daughters will prophesy, your young men will see visions, your old men will dream dreams.Acts 2:17

Sons and daughters first. The young named at the front of the sentence, before the elders, in a culture where nothing was ever listed that way.

So hear where you actually are, and hear it straight, because you have been getting it in pieces for six years and pieces are hard to answer.

You are not in a waiting room. Scripture puts the young at the front of the list, and the Spirit has never once asked a person how many birthdays they had before He filled them.

And the girl in your block did not knock on the wrong door. Let me say that again, because it is the sentence you actually need. She did not come to you because there was nobody else. She came to you because you were the one she trusted, and trust is not a consolation prize.

The fire this house is named for fell in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906, and there were children sitting on the floor at the front of that room, and nobody moved them out of the way to make room for the qualified. The Spirit fell on the room. He did not work along the rows by age.