The Backseat

At 3pm I was already moving.

I’d blocked the time weeks ahead, but the afternoon ran long the way afternoons at my job sometime do, and by the time I logged off, I was racing the clock. I gathered my things in one armful and speed-walked to the car, the kind that is technically not running but would be if anyone timed it. It was one of Colin’s initial cross country meets, and I wanted it to be special.

Colin isn’t a kid who asks for things. He’s never been. What he wants is experiences, though he doesn’t always know what shape they ought to take. If you ask him what he’d like, he’ll say “time with you,” every time, and he means it. He doesn’t much care whether that’s a lazy Saturday at home in our pajamas or a road trip to another state. As long as I’m there, it counts. (It’s lovely, and it has also made Christmas genuinely difficult for most of his life. Some things you simply can’t wrap in paper and a bow.)

But that day I had an idea, and it was going to require me to stretch a bit.

I drove the most efficient route I knew, at every bit of the speed limit and not a hair over it. I pulled into the store and moved through the aisles like I was on a timed course. Snacks first: a whole spread, some he’d loved for years and a few new ones he’d never tried but that I was nearly certain he’d love. A pair of new athletic shorts for the race. His favorite soda, cold. Checkout. Back to the car. Back on the road.

I slid into the school parking lot just in time.

He opened the door, started to climb in, and then stopped and looked into the back seat. There was the whole platter laid out, the shorts folded beside it, the soda sweating in the cupholder. He had 30 minutes before the meet started, and all of it was his.

His face did something I wish I’d been able to photograph. He was elated, and then touched, when he realized that some of the snacks he was already reaching for were ones he’d never eaten before, and that I’d picked them anyway because I knew he’d like them. I’d been paying attention. I knew my son.

I drove to the meet listening to him crunch and rustle and sigh happily in the back seat, and somewhere around the second stoplight it hit me how much joy I was feeling. Not just because he had snacks. Because he knew what it had cost me, in money and time and a fair bit of stress. Because he could tell I’d gone out of my way. Because he felt noticed, cherished, thought of.

And I wondered, in a way I hadn’t before, whether God feels something like that about us.

Jesus asked a question every parent can answer.

“Which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are 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).

I’ve read that passage a hundred times as a kind of argument. That afternoon I read it as a description. I know exactly what it feels like to give a good gift to my child, and Jesus is saying that God’s version of that feeling is how much more.

Luke tells the same teaching with one change I’d never noticed until recently. Where Matthew ends with “good things,” Luke ends with “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13). The best of the good things is God Himself.

That stopped me, because it’s exactly what Colin has always asked for. The snacks were wonderful. But what he wanted, underneath, was me. And what the Father gives, underneath every other gift, is His own presence.

Jesus says the giving isn’t a reluctant duty.

“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:32). The Greek verb there carries the sense of delight, of being well pleased. It isn’t that God is willing to give if pressed. He enjoys it.

I used to read verses like that and picture something formal, a king distributing favors from a throne. I picture it differently now. I picture a parent in a car at a stoplight, grinning at the sound of a happy kid in the back seat.

I knew what he’d like before he’d even tasted it.

That’s the part that moved Colin most, I think. Not the snacks themselves but the knowing. I’d watched him long enough to guess what flavors he’d go for, what he’d reach for first, what he’d love even though it was new.

Jesus says, “your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:8). I’ve often heard that verse used to make prayer sound pointless, as if God’s knowing made the asking unnecessary. But I think it’s meant to sound more like the back seat. He has been paying attention. He knows what will delight us, even things we haven’t tried yet and couldn’t have named.

David has a line about a prepared table.

“You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows” (Psalm 23:5). The word is prepare. Someone arranged that table before David sat down at it. Someone thought ahead.

I’d never connected that verse to a car before. But a platter laid out across a back seat for a boy about to run his first race is a prepared table, and the preparing was half the joy of it for me.

Some of the meaning was in what it cost.

When David wanted to build an altar on Araunah’s threshing floor, Araunah offered him the land and the oxen for free. David refused. “I will not offer burnt offerings to the LORD my God that cost me nothing” (2 Samuel 24:24). He understood that a gift’s meaning is bound up in its price.

Colin understood it too. He knew I’d rushed. He knew the snacks and shorts and soda weren’t free. And somehow that made them taste better.

Paul makes the same argument about God, on a scale I can barely take in. “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). The gift that cost God the most has already been given. Everything else follows from that, and it follows freely.

Christmas has always been hard with a boy who wants time instead of things.

You can’t wrap an afternoon. You can’t put a bow on an adventure. I’ve stood in more than one December wondering what on earth to put under the tree for a child whose only request is me.

But I realized, driving to that meet, that God faced the same problem and solved it. The gift He gave was a person, His own presence, and the one time that gift was wrapped, it was in swaddling cloths and laid in a manger (Luke 2:12). Some things can’t be wrapped in paper and a bow. God wrapped one anyway.

I want to be careful not to overstate what this means.

God gives good things. That doesn’t mean He gives everything we ask for, when we ask for it. I didn’t give Colin soda with every meal for the rest of the week. A good parent decides what’s good, and sometimes what’s good is no. I’ve written plenty about seasons of silence and unmet longings, and I don’t think this afternoon erases any of that. The Father who delights to give is also the Father who sometimes withholds, for reasons a child in the back seat can’t see.

But I think I’d lost sight of the delight. I’d come to think of God’s generosity as something careful and measured, given out after due consideration. I’d forgotten that He might enjoy it.

Colin didn’t apologize for the cost. He didn’t tell me I shouldn’t have. He didn’t try to pay me back or calculate what it had taken. He grinned, said thank you, and ate.

I’m not very good at that. When someone does something generous for me, my first instinct is to minimize it, deflect it, or immediately look for a way to balance the scales. I’ve noticed I sometimes do the same thing with God. I receive His good gifts half-apologizing, as though I’ve slipped something into my pocket I wasn’t meant to have.

Watching my son in the rearview mirror, I wondered how it feels to God when we do that. I know how it would have felt to me if Colin had looked at that platter and said, “Oh, you really didn’t need to.” It would have taken a little of the joy out of it.

I don’t remember his time (though, neither did he), but I remember his face when he looked into the back seat. And I remember thinking that if I could feel that much joy over a platter of snacks for a boy I love, I’d been badly underestimating how much joy God takes in giving good gifts to His children, and how much He hopes we’ll simply take them, grin, and say thank you.