You Are Not Being Kept for Later

It usually happens at the door, on the way out, and it usually comes with a hand on your shoulder.

Somebody stops you. They are lovely. They genuinely are, and that matters, so hold on to it for the next two thousand words: they are not the villain of this piece and there is no villain of this piece. They beam at you and they say it. You lot are the future of the church.

And you say thanks. Because what else is there? Thanks. You have said thanks to that sentence, at a rough count, somewhere north of forty times.

The evening that produced it was, by the way, a good evening. There was a table tennis table with a net held on by a bulldog clip. There was a bowl of crisps that went in eleven seconds and a second bowl that lasted the whole night because nobody wanted to be the one who finished it. Somebody's guitar. The heater that makes a noise like a small airplane. Two adults who gave up their Wednesday to be there and did not have to, and who were, in fairness, funnier than they had any right to be.

And there was the rest of it. You got asked how school is going by four separate people in about nine minutes, and every one of them meant it, and you gave four slightly different answers and none of them was true. You got asked to sort out the laptop, because you are fifteen and therefore, by universal agreement across the entire building, a computer. You got handed a leaflet about a thing next summer. Somebody said they remembered when you were this high, with the hand at knee level, which cannot possibly be accurate.

None of that is the problem. Honestly. Most of it is affection with nowhere else to go.

Here is the problem, and it is one word long, and it is the word future.

Because what a sentence like that quietly does, said with total warmth about forty times, is file you. Not now: later. Not a person in a room on a Wednesday, but a thing being kept, the way seeds get kept, in a paper packet in a kitchen drawer, in the dark, with a good garden written all over them and no soil anywhere near. Seeds in a drawer are not a garden. They are a garden later. And later is a place nobody has ever been able to stand in.

So you come home from a genuinely good evening with a small flat feeling that you have never had a name for and would not know who to describe it to. You are being counted, and you are being counted forward.

This one is for you, and I am going to talk to you exactly the way I would talk to anybody in that building, because that is what you are.

The tense Scripture actually uses

There is a letter in the New Testament that stops in the middle of itself, turns to the young people in the room, and tells them what is already the case about them.

Not what would be true later. Not what was being worked towards. What was true, in the present tense, on the day that letter was read out.

I have written unto you, young men, because ye are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have overcome the wicked one.1 John 2:14

You are in the church now, and not on the way towards it. That line in 1 John 2:14 is not a compliment paid to keep somebody going: it is a description of a condition the young were already standing in, and the Holy Spirit is the One who hands it forward through two thousand years and drops it on a Wednesday night with a bulldog clip on the net.

Read the three things it says. Strong. The word of God living in them. Something already overcome. Not one of those is a thing a person is being kept back for, and the writer had every opportunity to add when you are older and did not.

There is a second letter, written to one young man who was already leading a real place, with real problems and people older than him who had opinions about how old he was. It does not tell him to wait either. 1 Timothy 4:12 tells him to let nobody despise his youth and to be the example of the believers: the pattern, the one the others copy. That is not a job handed to somebody sitting in a waiting room.

You have the Holy Spirit, and He did not arrive on a trial basis. When the Spirit was poured out, the announcement in Acts 2:17 was that sons and daughters would speak, and young men would see visions, and the young were not an appendix to that list, they were named in the middle of it, in the same breath as everybody else.

There is no junior version of Him. He is not diluted for people under eighteen and topped up later. Whatever He is doing in the woman who put her hand on your shoulder at the door, He is doing in you, at full strength, in a bedroom, on a school night, with the door shut.

Nobody has to wait to be real

Let me name the fear underneath the flat feeling, because it will lose most of its power the moment somebody says it out loud on your behalf.

It is not that people are unkind. It is the suspicion that everyone in that building is being quietly patient with you. That they are all, warmly and lovingly, waiting to see whether this sticks. That your faith is being treated as something that has not yet been tested by anything, and that until it is, it counts as promising rather than as real.

You are not a rehearsal for a Christian somebody is expecting later. Scripture has God speaking straight to a boy in 1 Samuel 3, in the night, in his own name, rather than through the older man asleep in the next room, and the Spirit is the One who still does exactly that, on the days it feels like something and on the days it feels like nothing at all.

And your faith has been tested, whatever anybody assumes. Being the only one in your year who still goes is a test. Deciding what to say when somebody asks, in front of other people, and there is a half second where the whole thing is on you, is a test. Getting up on a Sunday when nobody in the house is making you is a test. Those are not practice runs. Nobody hands out a certificate for them and heaven has not missed one of them.

You have been given the same word that is holding up every adult in that building. There is not a stronger version of Scripture kept behind the counter for people with more years on them, and the Holy Spirit does not teach the older half of the room a deeper syllabus, which is exactly why a fifteen year old can read a chapter and see something the four people who asked about school walked straight past.