Children of Peace

You have said the same thing to your child four hundred times and none of it appears to have landed. Or they are grown, and you lie awake doing arithmetic on what you got wrong.

There is a hymn everybody knows the first line of and almost nobody knows the source of. Jesus loves me, this I know first appeared in 1860 inside a novel called Say and Seal, written by Susan Warner with her sister Anna. In the story a man is holding a dying child who asks to be sung to, and those are the words he gives him. Anna Warner wrote them as a poem for a boy who was not going to grow up. That line is not a nursery sentiment. It is what you say when your instruction has run out and something else has to hold the child.

Isaiah says the same thing in the older register. And all thy children shall be taught of the LORD; and great shall be the peace of thy children. The one being addressed is a city pictured as a barren and forsaken woman, promised more children than she can count, so this is a promise of restoration and not a parenting technique. And look at the teacher. Not you. Your words are one voice among the voices God is using, and the peace that follows is his work rather than the fruit of your flawless instruction.

The warning sits inside the relief, and it cuts both ways. If their peace is not manufactured by your teaching, it is also not destroyed by your worst year, and you were never the last line of defence. But do not carry that off in the wrong direction. A voice God uses is still a voice, and the child in the next room is learning more from what you are like on a bad Thursday than from anything you have said four hundred times.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 137 is Unprofitable Servants (Luke 17:10).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna