The Noise Is Small Children

I want to say something to the woman whose house is loud, and whose noise has names and ages.

Most advice about a quiet life is written as though noise were a fault in a household. Something that got in and could be got out again, with better arrangements or firmer evenings or a change in how a person orders their day.

Your noise is not a fault. Your noise is four and seven, and it is doing exactly what four and seven do, and it is not going to be reduced by anything except the passage of about a decade.

So every piece of advice you have read has landed the same way. Not as help. As a description of a life somebody else is living, with a quiet in it that you are apparently supposed to have found.

And underneath that, over a few years, a belief has settled in, and it has never once been said out loud. The belief is that this season is a gap. A stretch in which the real thing is not available, to be got through, after which the deeper life resumes.

I want to argue with that, and I want to do it from a passage where the disciples made exactly the same assumption and were corrected on the spot.

They tried to quieten the room

Matthew 19. People are bringing children to Jesus so that He can put His hands on them and pray.

Then were there brought unto him little children, that he should put his hands on them, and pray: and the disciples rebuked them. But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven. (Matthew 19:13-14)

The disciples rebuked them.

Now, those men were not being cruel. Think about what they were actually doing. They were protecting a teaching session. Something serious was going on, and children make noise, and the reasonable thing to do was to move them along so that the important part could continue.

They were doing exactly what everybody in the room would have expected, and they were wrong, and Jesus says so immediately.

Suffer little children, and forbid them not.

Read what He does not say there. He does not say the children may stay if they are quiet. He does not arrange a separate time for them. He does not say a word about managing the noise. He reverses the whole assumption, and He does it in front of everybody.

You are not an interruption to the real thing, and the room was never going to be improved by removing you from it. Matthew 19:14 has Him overrule the men who were tidying the gathering rather than the people making it loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that arrive as welcome instead of as a nice thought about children.

And there is one more clause, and it is the one that undoes the gap theory entirely.

For of such is the kingdom of heaven.

He does not merely tolerate them. He says the kingdom looks like that. Which means the noise in your front room is not the opposite of the thing you are trying to reach. It is being used, by Him, as the picture of it.

You have a household that He used as a picture of His own kingdom, and it was chosen rather than merely permitted. Matthew 19:14 says of such is the kingdom of heaven about a group of small children in a loud moment. The Spirit of God is the one who can make that land in a woman who has felt disqualified for years.

The gap that is not a gap

So let me deal with the belief directly.

This season is not a gap. It is not a waiting room outside the real Christian life, and there is no evidence anywhere in Scripture that God works on people differently while their children are small.

What is true is that the form changes. The long quiet stretches are not there. But the form is not the thing, and a person who mistakes the form for the thing will spend a decade waiting for a shape rather than living the substance.

The substance is a person known by God, speaking to Him and being changed. That has never once required a silent room and it does not require one now.

Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength. (Psalm 8:2)

Ordained strength. Out of that. It is a strange verse and it is not an accident.

You are in the substance already, and the form was never the thing that carried it. Psalm 8:2 has strength ordained out of the mouths of the very smallest children rather than out of a settled room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can show a woman that she has not been outside anything.

And one plain thing, said once and then on we go. If what is loud is not the house but something inside you, and if some part of you has been thinking about not being here, tell one person today. In the United States you can call or text 988, at any hour. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, or one person whose number you know by heart. That is wisdom, and God is entirely in it.

Pray with them in the room

Here is the practice, and it is smaller than a routine and better than one.

Pray out loud with the children there. Do not send them out, do not wait for a lull, and do not ask anybody to be quiet.

Say it in ordinary words, at ordinary volume, in the middle of whatever is going on. Lord, this is our house and we are Yours, thank You for today.

There are two reasons and both matter.

The first is for you. It settles, in your own hearing, that this room is a place where God is spoken to, and that settles the disqualification faster than any argument I could make.

The second is that they hear it. Not as a lesson. As a normal feature of a house, which is how a thing gets into a child rather than onto them.

You are able to pray in a room full of noise, and the noise was never a reason to wait. Matthew 19:14 has children brought right into the middle of what He was doing rather than around the edges of it. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in six ordinary words said over a floor covered in toys.