The Courage of a Child

BOLD ASKING IS AN act of trust, and God receives it as trust. His No is never a grade on your faith. My father taught me both of these things before I could read. I was five years old, perhaps six, when he took me to the dentist to have a baby tooth pulled. I remember three things: the smell of disinfectant, the enormous chair, and the tray of bright instruments I had been told not to look at and therefore studied in detail. I climbed into the chair by myself and held still. Whether I cried I cannot tell you; memory is merciful about such things. What I remember without a gap is what came after. My father drove me to a store and put into my hands the costume of the superhero I loved most, the very thing I had wished for out loud for months. It was for my bravery, he said.

The tooth had earned nothing. Teeth loosen on their own schedule, and submitting to the inevitable earns no prize. What moved my father was the courage: a frightened boy had climbed into the terrible chair anyway. The bravery delighted him, and the delight took the shape of the thing the boy wanted most. Fathers are like that about courage. Scripture insists, in the plainest language it owns, that the Father in heaven is like this too.

Watch a small child ask, because the child is Scripture's own picture of how to pray. A child does not know his parents' will. He has no access to the family finances and no seat in their councils. He asks anyway. He names the toy, the dog, the later bedtime, the second helping, exactly and out loud. Every request risks a No, and when the No comes he takes it hard: the lip trem-bles, the tears spill. By breakfast there is a new request. The refusal was grieved and survived, and the asking went on, because the child's confidence never rested on the answers. It rests on the parents themselves.

Good parents hear all that asking as trust. The child believes they can provide, believes they wish him well, believes their lap is a safe place to bring a desire and to weep when it is refused. He does not read a No as a verdict on who he is. He reads it, if he reads it as anything, as a decision rooted in a wisdom he cannot yet reach. Ask honest parents what would frighten them, and they will tell you: a child who stopped asking. A child who screened every wish and voiced only what was sure of approval has begun to manage the relationship. Somewhere in him trust has died, and strategy has been hired in its place.

Jesus built His case for bold petition on this picture, from the parents' side. In the Sermon on the Mount, right after commanding us to ask, to seek, and to knock, He said:

Or what man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father

who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him! (Matthew 7:9-11 NKJV)

Notice what Jesus takes for granted. The son asks for bread, an actual food with a name. He is hungry and says so, and Jesus treats this as the ordinary behavior of a son. Then the argument climbs from the lesser to the greater, and the hinge is two words: how much more. If flawed fathers, "being evil," still give good gifts to their children, what must the Father in heaven be toward those who ask Him? The warrant for boldness is the character of the One being asked, never the worthiness of the child. Nothing about the boy qualifies him except hunger and nearness. Nothing about you qualifies you either, and that is precisely why you may come.

So the asking Scripture puts its name to is concrete asking. The prayer Jesus taught sets a loaf down in the middle of it: "Give us this day our daily bread" (Matthew 6:11). It ends by naming rescue: "deliver us from the evil one" (Matthew 6:13). The sick who came to Jesus named their diseases, their daughters, their dying servants, one case at a time. James traced the poverty of much of our praying to its timidity: "you do not have because you do not ask" (James 4:2).

I take that permission personally, so let me confess one of my smaller requests. For years I prayed for a good musical instrument to praise God at home. Nobody needs such a thing the way a man needs bread, and every time I mentioned it to Him I felt faintly embarrassed. I mentioned it anyway. After years of asking it came, through the kindness of friends, and it fills the house to this day. It was built to serve a church, so its sound is far too large for a living room. The only thing I regret now is my embarrassment. I had swallowed the notion that God should be troubled only with disasters. The Father of Matthew 7 keeps no such office hours. A Father who has numbered the hairs of your head is not indifferent to particulars.

Now I have to name the thing that quietly kills petition, because I have heard its history in many conversations. Somewhere along the way a prayer was refused, or several in painful succession. A child hears No as a decision about the request; these believers heard it as a verdict on themselves, God's disappointment with a faith never good enough, too small, too impure. Asking again would only invite another humiliation. So they retired from asking, quietly. They did not leave the faith. They still worship, still serve, still offer public prayers as warm as anyone's. But the petitions that say what they actually want they now hold back, the way a child who has decided his father is ashamed of him keeps his wishes to himself. The whole sad structure rests on a single misreading. From a good father, a No has never once meant, "I am ashamed that you asked me."

The reason we go on asking has nothing to do with guaranteed outcomes. We ask because God commands it, and so every request is an act of obedience. We ask without any certainty of the result, and so every request is an act of faith. Together they say the one thing we most resist: we have stopped pretending to be self-sufficient. And whatever God answers, He answers out of the whole of a life, while we see only the corner we are standing in. I have watched a few of His refusals open slowly across decades and show the good folded inside them. A request refused, wept over, survived, and followed by the next request is a life of prayer in good order. It looks childish. It looked childish when you were four, to everyone except your father.

Scripture hands this confidence a document. Hebrews calls faith "the substance of things hoped for" (Hebrews 11:1), and the word behind "substance" named something you could hold: a title deed, the paper that let a man claim land he could not yet see from where he stood. The deed creates nothing. The field is already real; the deed is the holder's standing to claim it, and he can produce it before a judge long before he walks the ground. Faith holds the deed to what is hoped for. It leans its whole weight on the character of the One who signed it, which is why the holder can be miles from the property and still at peace. A child asking at his father's knee is holding exactly that kind of paper.

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THERE IS A MAN in the Gospels who asked with a child's courage, though nothing else about him was childlike. He was a leper. The law drew a wide circle around him and ordered everyone he loved to stand outside it. He lived banished from his own life, made to cry a warning at his approach. A man learns to stop asking for things, living like that. This one had not. When Jesus came down from the mountain with great multitudes at His back, the leper broke through every convention and came close.

And behold, a leper came and worshiped Him, saying, "Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean." (Matthew 8:2)

The whole doctrine of bold petition is in the two halves of that sentence. The first clause hands over the outcome: if You are willing. He presumes nothing about what Jesus intends. He does not reason that because Jesus can make him clean, Jesus therefore will. The second clause names the desire without a tremor: You can make me clean. Clean, the one word every rule of his existence said he would never wear again. The leper did not say "if You are willing" and then hold his breath, waiting to be sure of Christ's will before he risked the rest. Surrender and boldness came out of his mouth in a single breath, and that single breath is the whole posture of biblical asking.

Matthew tells us what happened next: "Then Jesus put out His hand and touched him, saying, `I am willing; be cleansed'" (Matthew 8:3). Jesus laid His hand on a man the whole country had sworn never to touch. The healing could have come on a word; it does elsewhere in that same chapter. The hand was not necessary. I take the hand to be Jesus' own verdict on that man's way of asking.

Keep both halves of the leper's prayer together, because I keep meeting it with one half amputated. Cut the surrender away and what is left is presumption. That is the preaching that slides from God can to God will, as though the two were one and the same. God can do whatever He pleases; He is God, and no one honors Him by pretending otherwise. Whether He wills a thing in your particular life is another question, and often a hidden one. No wonder so many people, pastors among them, end up disillusioned by a promise God never signed His name to. I have sat in the wreckage such preaching leaves behind: believers at a hospital window, hunting for the flaw in their faith that blocked the guaranteed miracle. Take healing. God's will may be that the body is completely restored. It may be that the sickness stays, for our own slow transformation, or even for the sake of someone else He loves. Which of these it is we may never learn on this side of the grave. The leper's prayer was built for exactly that uncertainty.

Cut the boldness away and you get the opposite disease, a reverence so anxious it never dares to name a thing. I know those prayers because I have prayed them: long, devout, and empty of a single request from end to end. They are offered by people waiting to feel certain of God's will before they dare want something in His hearing. The leper waited for nothing of the kind. He was certain of one thing only, Christ's power. He was uncertain of the very thing we insist on having settled in advance, Christ's willingness. He asked anyway, and he walked away clean.

Long before I understood that Christ, I saw my first superhero film in a theater, about seven, and it took me over completely. For years afterward, whenever I sat in church and heard the great stories read, Jesus feeding five thousand, Jesus healing whole villages, I pictured Him as a kind of superhero. No cape, no flying; even a child trims the costume down out of reverence. But a figure of enormous power striding through the world to rescue it, always arriving in time: that was my Jesus. I will not mock the boy who built Him. The world is frightening when you are seven, and it steadies a small heart to believe someone invincible is on duty.

That image had to die, and the dying took me decades. There is something hidden inside our appetite for superheroes. We do not merely want someone to fight evil; we want a rescuer who cannot be hurt, who can mend everything without being broken, who can save the world without being rejected by it. That is not the Gospel, and it is not the way of Christ. The true Christ does not come to us as a sanitized projection of our fantasies. He does not come to confirm our ideas of power. He comes to crucify them. He walks into cities and is misunderstood in them. He touches my leper, and under the law the touch makes Him unclean, and He takes the contamination as the price of the healing. He prays with tears, not lasers. He hangs on a cross, not in the sky, and when the powers of the world come crashing down on Him He does not answer force with force. He absorbs all of it in silence and gives Himself away. The invincible rescuer I assembled as a boy was born of my fear. The real Christ bleeds.

The unlearning belongs in this chapter for one reason. When the superhero died, I nearly buried the asking along with him. For a season I believed bold requests had belonged to my childhood religion, as if a man who knew Christ crucified should be past wanting rescues. The false savior did have to die before Christ could reign, because he was born from fear, not faith; he wanted victory without vulnerability, resurrection without death. But I had tied two very different things together in the one box. The boy's picture of the Giver was far too small, and it had to go. The boy's confidence in the asking was the truest thing about him, and it should have stayed. The costume from the dentist's chair ended up in a box eventually, the way costumes do. The courage was meant to be permanent. The cross took my invincible rescuer away and never once touched my permission to ask. If anything that permission deepened, because the requests now go to Someone who knows from the inside what it costs to want something in this world and to say so.

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YEARS AGO A YOUNG person in our family reached a crossroads at the end of school, and the problem was the enviable kind. Two fine schools had said yes. Each offered to carry half the cost, and each pointed the years ahead in a wholly different direction. One was famous for the very field this young person loved; the other was simply famous. We debated it around the table for weeks, arguing the same three points in a new order each night, and settled nothing, for there was no bad option to cross off. In the end we did the thing we had been circling all along. We stopped arguing and asked. As a family we named the two schools before God, plainly, the way a child names bread, and asked Him to settle what we could not.

I meant it seriously enough to preach it that season. Then we went back to ordinary life. The answer arrived on an ordinary afternoon, while the young person was away at a competition. Word came that one of the two schools would now cover the entire cost. All of it, more than we had asked for, more than we had thought to ask. I said it out loud the moment we read the news, and I have said it in my heart many times since: God settles it, case closed.

I hand you that story with gratitude and with caution, because stories like it are so easily misused. It happened. The provision was real, and the sense of a hand quietly settling the matter was as concrete as the message that carried it. But I cannot manufacture a method out of it. I have stood at other crossroads and prayed with the same plainness, and no word ever came; we chose in the dark like everyone else, and learned slowly that He had been in the choosing too. I have received answers whose aftermath was so rough that we wondered whether the answer had come from God at all. Abraham held his promised son only in extreme old age. Moses never set foot in the land he had walked toward for forty years. A Father who sometimes delights His children with dramatic generosity has bound Himself to be their Father. He has nowhere bound Himself to be predictable.

What the story authorizes is the asking. Naming that desire before God did us good no outcome could ever take back. It gathered a scattered, arguing family around a single request. It moved the whole weight of the decision into His hands, where it had belonged from the start. One caution goes with the permission: once you have asked, leave the request in His hands. Do not audit the result every morning; a man who keeps checking will be discouraged long before the answer comes. Cast the care on Him, and keep your heart on Him rather than on the outcome.

The Old Testament keeps the mother of all such prayers, and Hannah had far more at stake than a choice of schools. She wanted a child. The LORD had closed her womb, Scripture says plainly, and the other wife in that house made a career of reminding her of it, year after year, sharpest at the yearly feast, until Hannah wept and could not eat. Her husband tried to talk her out of the wanting, the way loving, baffled husbands have tried in every century: "Am I not better to you than ten sons?" (1 Samuel 1:8).

She did not answer him with an argument. She rose, went up to the house of the LORD, and poured the whole thing out before God, weeping in anguish, her lips moving without a sound. She asked for the one thing she wanted, a son, and she was so far from vague that she made vows over his future before he existed. Eli the priest, watching this unregulated grief from his seat by the doorpost, drew the sensible religious conclusion. He decided she was drunk and told her to go sleep off her wine.

Her reply is one of the Old Testament's great descriptions of what praying actually is:

But Hannah answered and said, "No, my lord, I am a woman of sorrowful spirit. I have drunk neither wine nor intoxicating drink, but have poured out my soul before the LORD. Do not consider your maidservant a wicked woman, for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief I have spoken until now." Then Eli answered and said, "Go in peace, and the God of Israel grant your petition which you have asked of Him." (1 Samuel 1:15-17)

I have poured out my soul before the LORD. Out of the abundance of my complaint and grief. She made no effort to shrink the desire to a polite size. She brought the complaint and the grief in their abundance, her own word for it, and let them pour. And notice that to the officiating priest this looked like drunkenness. Raw petition often looks unseemly to religious eyes, including the pair each of us keeps trained on ourselves, and I suspect half the prayers that die unprayed are censored for exactly this. Eli recovered quickly, to his lasting credit, and watch what he blessed. Hannah never told him what she had asked for. He blessed the petition without ever hearing it. A soul poured out before the LORD is holy ground whatever its contents, and the pouring itself was the evidence of her faith.

One verse in her story matters more than all the rest for where we are going: "So the woman went her way and ate, and her face was no longer sad" (1 Samuel 1:18). Mark where that sentence falls. Samuel has not yet been conceived. Nothing in her circumstances has moved: the rival is still in the house, the womb is still closed. Hannah walked home with an old man's blessing over a request he never heard, and by every measure available to her she left with exactly what she had brought. Yet she could eat again, and her face had changed. Something real had already happened, and it happened in her, in the pouring out itself, before any answer existed anywhere in the world.

Our usual bookkeeping of prayer keeps no line for such a thing. We count the request going out and the answer coming back, and assume nothing happens in between except waiting. Hannah's face says otherwise. The asking is itself an event. Something is done to the one who asks, in the very act of asking, before the answer arrives, and whether or not the answer ever takes the shape we named. What that something is, what it costs, and why so many of us will do almost anything, including pray, sooner than undergo it, is the question we have now arrived at.