It Does Not Know Her Name

Sian has a map on the fridge with a circle drawn on it in green highlighter.

The circle is the catchment. The pin in the middle is their house. And the thin bit of green at the top right, where the circle very nearly does not reach, is the difference between the school with the music department and the school forty minutes on two buses.

She drew it in January. It has been on the fridge since January.

She has done everything. Both forms, correctly, early. She read the admissions criteria three times and then found the appeals process and read that too, in advance, in case. She has a folder. She rang the council in February and was told, politely and accurately, that nobody could tell her anything.

And offer day is the sixteenth, at some point after five o'clock, by email.

The last four nights she has been awake past one.

And here is the thing that turned it, and it came from an eleven year old who was not trying to say anything profound.

Nia asked, over cereal, in the ordinary way children ask enormous questions: "How do they decide?"

And Sian, who has read the criteria three times, explained it properly. Siblings first, then the distance measurement, then the tiebreak, and what a straight line distance means as opposed to a walking route.

And Nia said, "So it is not a person."

And Sian said, "No, love. It is a calculation."

And Nia said, "So it does not know anything about me," and went back to her cereal, because to an eleven year old that was a small clarifying fact and not a hammer blow.

Sian sat there.

Because she had spent four months braced. Braced in the way you brace against a judgment. And somewhere in her, without ever putting it into a sentence, she had been treating the allocation as though it were somebody looking at her family and forming a view.

It is not. It is a distance in meters and a list.

Now let me ask you what has been deciding something about you.

The algorithm, the panel, the criteria, the waiting list, the score. And I would guess that some part of you has been standing in front of it the way a person stands in front of a judge, waiting to hear what it thinks of you.

Two sparrows and a cent

Jesus says something about small birds in a passage that is otherwise about being handed over to hostile authorities, and the placement is the point.

Are not two sparrows sold for a cent? And yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows.Matthew 10:29 to 31

Look at the price. Two for a cent. He picks the cheapest thing in the market on purpose, the item nobody itemizes, and He says the Father is present at the fall of one of them.

The very hairs of your head are all numbered. Which is not a claim about God's filing system. It is a claim about attention: about a level of specific, personal knowledge that no process anywhere has, about you, held by somebody who is not obliged to hold it.

So hear this said over you at one in the morning with a map on the fridge. You are known by name in a way no criteria can be, and the thing you have been braced against does not have an opinion of your family and has never once had one. That is written down in the words of Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about sparrows and gets it past a mother's guard at one in the morning, which is not a thing anybody achieves by deciding to.

Now let me guard this, because a message like this can be turned into something false.

Nothing here promises you the green circle.

The distance is the distance. Sometimes the answer on the sixteenth is the forty minutes and the two buses, and this article is not going to tell you otherwise, and anybody who does is guessing with your child's year.

And nothing here says stop working. Appeal if it goes the other way. You already have the process read, and that is not a lack of faith, that is a mother doing her job. Scripture is full of people who worked every lever within reach and prayed at the same time.

What comes off you is the bracing.

Because that is the thing Nia removed in eight words over a bowl of cereal, and it is worth seeing exactly what she removed. Sian had been standing in front of a calculation as though it were a person with a view of her. And a person with a view of you can wound you. A distance in meters cannot, whatever it returns.

So the four months of one in the morning were not spent waiting for a school place. They were spent defending her family in front of something that has never looked at them.

And here is the other half, the one that matters more.

There is Somebody who does have a view of your child, and He is not the one running the allocation.

He counts sparrows nobody itemizes. He numbers hairs. He is present at the fall of a bird worth half a cent, and He is not present at your sixteenth of the month as a spectator, because the written word says His kingdom rules over all and that includes a council database. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that difference land in a person's body rather than merely in their head, and He does it in His own time.

There was a movement five hundred years ago whose people were assessed constantly by processes they had no part in: courts, registers, licenses, lists of who was permitted to teach and who was not. What they insisted on was that none of those lists was the register that mattered, and that the God who governs all of it knew each of them by name. It did not spare them the lists. It stopped the lists from being able to tell them who they were.