My Children Have Never Been Out In Rain

You worked it out on a Tuesday and it has bothered you ever since.

Your eldest is eleven. And in eleven years, apart from running from a door to a car and back, they have never once been outside while it was raining.

Not once. Not for fun. Not for anything.

And you did not decide that. Nobody sat down and made a policy about rain. It accumulated, in the ordinary way, out of a hundred small sensible moments where going out in it was slightly more trouble than not.

But the accumulation has produced something. There is a whole ordinary category of weather that your children experience only through glass, and the reason it bothers you is not that they are missing an experience. It is that they have learned something you never meant to teach, which is that rain means indoors.

I want to be careful here, because this can slide into self reproach very fast, and self reproach has never once got a family out of a door.

The small rain and the great rain

There is a passage in Job about weather that is worth reading slowly, because of what it does with the ordinary version.

For he saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth; likewise to the small rain, and to the great rain of his strength. (Job 37:6, King James Version)

The small rain, and the great rain of his strength.

Notice there are two, and both of them are addressed. It would have been easy for that verse to speak only about the great rain, because the great rain is the impressive one and this is a passage about the power of God.

But the small rain is named. The drizzle. The unremarkable, gray, ordinary wetness that falls on a Tuesday afternoon and cancels nothing anywhere except in your house.

You are looking at weather that God speaks to directly, and it was never beneath notice or beneath going out into. Job 37:6 names the small rain alongside the great rain and gives both of them the same speaker, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as an opening rather than as a rebuke.

And notice what the rain is doing in that passage. It is not a hazard being described. It is God's ordinary provision arriving at ordinary volume, and the whole chapter is a man being asked to look at things he has stopped seeing.

You have not been failing to protect anybody from something dangerous, and it was never a risk that has kept eleven years indoors. The written word puts the small rain in the list of things God speaks to, and the Spirit of God is what takes the word negligent off a father who was only ever being sensible.

Starting at eleven is not starting late

Now let me deal with the thing that is actually stopping you, because it is not the rain.

It is that the first time is going to be strange.

If it had started when they were three, it would be normal now. Starting it at eleven means announcing something, which means somebody asking why, which means you either explaining a whole realization you had on a Tuesday, or saying nothing and having it be odd.

That is the real obstacle and it deserves to be treated as a real one. The first time is allowed to be strange, and a household starting something at eleven is not starting it late.

You are not late, and it was never true that a thing had to begin in early childhood to belong to a family. Job 37 asks a grown man to look at weather he has known all his life, which is exactly why the Spirit of God is unbothered by a household beginning something at eleven.

And the strangeness has a length. It is one occasion. The second time it is a thing you do, and the third time it is unremarkable, and nobody in your house will ever mention that it started when the eldest was eleven, because children do not audit the history of their own routines.

Say nothing about it

So here is the practical part, and the whole method is in what you leave out.

The next time it rains, at a moment when nobody is doing anything, say: we are going out for ten minutes.

Do not explain. Do not say I have realized something. Do not say it will be fun, because that is a claim, and a claim can be disproved in the first street.

You are able to start this without a speech, and it has never once needed to be introduced to have been begun. The passage names the small rain plainly and without ceremony, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a father saying one level sentence on a wet afternoon.

Then go, for ten minutes, and come back, and be entirely ordinary about it. Coats over a chair. Nothing said. Do not ask anybody whether they enjoyed it, because that turns it into a test.

And if somebody complains the whole way, let them complain the whole way. The complaining is not a verdict on the outing, and it is certainly not a reason to wait another eleven years.

You are able to let the first one go badly, and it has never once been the quality of a first attempt that decided whether a thing became ordinary. Job 37:6 gives the small rain the same speaker as the great rain without ranking either of them, and the Spirit of God is the one who is out on a wet street with a family doing something for the first time.