The Gate on the First Morning

The first morning of term at that gate is the single most concentrated fifteen minutes in the whole calendar of that street, and Yolanda has a good view of it because she is early.

She does the Tuesday and Thursday run for her sister, and the first day is always a Tuesday, which is how she comes to be standing at those railings at ten to nine holding two bookbags and a cardigan somebody will want back by lunchtime.

And what she does, standing there, because there is nothing else to do, is watch.

Two hundred handovers in fifteen minutes.

Some of them are nothing. A boy of ten walks past his father without looking back and the father says something at his shoulder blades and the boy raises one hand, and that is the whole transaction, and both of them are fine.

Some of them are not nothing. There is a girl in reception who has attached herself to a sleeve with both hands and is not making any noise at all, which is worse than making noise, and her mother is crouched down in the middle of a crowd doing the thing where you are calm on the outside at some cost.

There is a father who walks away too fast. Yolanda notices him particularly, because she recognizes the speed. He does not turn round at the corner, and he does not turn round because he cannot do it slowly.

And here is what she is thinking, at ten to nine, holding two bags and a cardigan.

Not one of those people thinks they have lost a child.

Not one. Not the crouched mother, not the fast father, not the man on the phone by the bins who has done this eleven times and does not look up. Every single one of them is going to be back at this railing at three, and every one of them knows exactly where their child is, and not one of them has stopped being that child's mother or father between now and then.

And she is standing there with both hands round something she has never handed to anybody, and could not tell you, if you asked her at that gate, exactly why she is holding it.

You have that grip. Yours is on something entirely different. I am not going to guess what, and this article never will. But you know your hands are round it, and you know you could not give a reason out loud that would satisfy you.

Hannah gives back the thing she asked for

There is a woman in the first chapter of Samuel who wanted one thing for years and got it, and then did something with it that people have found difficult to read ever since.

Therefore also I have lent him to the LORD; as long as he liveth he shall be lent to the LORD.1 Samuel 1:28

Hers was a child. I want to say that plainly and then say the other thing plainly too: yours may be nothing like hers. This article does not know what you are holding, and it is not going to guess, and if you have been braced for it to name something, you can stop.

What transfers is not the object. It is the mechanism.

Look at the word she uses. Lent. In the Hebrew it is a play on the word she used when she asked for him in the first place: she asked, and now she gives back the asked-for thing, and the two words are the same root. She is not disposing of something. She is completing a circle she started.

You are able to hand something back to the One it came from, and it is already yours to do. That is the written word and not my read of your morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a scene at a doorpost in Shiloh and lays it against a set of school railings at ten to nine.

And now the sentence that answers the fear you are actually holding.

She was still sewing for him every year

One chapter later, in the middle of an account of something else entirely, there is a line that most people read straight past.

Moreover his mother made him a little coat, and brought it to him from year to year.

A coat. Every year. Which means she measured him, in her head or in her hands, every year. Which means she thought about him constantly, and planned around him, and traveled to him, and arrived with something she had made.

The handing over did not end the loving. It changed the shape of it and it did not reduce it by one degree.

This is yours, and what is handed over is not taken from you, and it is already settled. First Samuel 2 says from year to year in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who moved that woman to sing the song in chapter two is the one making it a present fact in a woman holding two bookbags at a gate.

That is the fear, is it not. Not that God is unsafe in general. You would say He is safe; you have said it about other people's situations without hesitating. The fear is specific and it is quiet and it goes: if I hand this over, the loving of it ends, and I become somebody who used to have it.

The coat says otherwise. The mother in that story is more involved in that boy's life after the handing over than most people are in anything, and the whole nation ends up knowing his name.

Now let me guard this properly.

I am not promising you an outcome. Hannah's story went a particular way and yours is not a template of hers, and nothing in this article tells you what happens next with the thing you are holding. That is God's business and I will not pretend to it.

And you have not forfeited anything by holding it this long. There is no penalty clause. God has not been at that gate for years getting colder about you, and if you read this and cannot do it today, He is not further away tomorrow. Some of you will hand it over years from now and it will be exactly on time.