After the Call Ends

The call lasted eleven minutes and then it did not.

There was a wave, and a bit of laughing that arrived a second late, and a face that froze halfway through a word, and then the screen turned into the picture it always turns into. A photograph of the four of them at a beach, from a summer that already feels like a long time ago.

He sat holding the tablet with both hands, the way you hold something that might still do the thing it was doing.

"Can we call them back?"

His father said not tonight. He said it as kindly as anyone can say it, which is to say it landed anyway.

"Why could they not stay on?"

And there it is, the question with no floor under it. There is an answer, and the answer is made of grown-up words like signal and hours and the way things are arranged, and every one of them is true, and not one of them is what he is asking. He knows the reasons. He has been told the reasons. He is not asking for information at half past eight at night.

His father put the tablet face down on the shelf, which is its own small ceremony in that house, and sat on the edge of the bed, and had nothing.

That is where this begins. Not with a good answer. With a man on the edge of a bed at the end of an evening, out of good answers, holding a folded scarf that smells faintly of somebody else's kitchen.

The scarf was the boy's idea. It lives on the pillow now, under the corner where his cheek goes.

And there is a true thing to say into that room, and it is short, and it is not a promise about dates, and it will still be true in the morning. It is worth having in your mouth before the tablet goes dark tomorrow.

Two rooms, one God, at the same moment

Here is what a small person is actually asking when they ask why the person could not stay on the screen.

They are not asking about the connection. They are asking whether love survives the gap. A screen makes distance feel solved for eleven minutes, and then it hands the distance straight back, and a child feels that handover in their whole body.

So the answer cannot be about screens. It has to be about who is in both rooms.

And you are not the only one awake with this tonight. Jeremiah 23:24 asks whether God fills heaven and earth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns that from a large idea into a near one, in this bedroom, at this hour.

Am I a God who is only close by, and not a God far away? Do I not fill heaven and earth?Jeremiah 23:24

Read it as a child would hear it. God is not in one place tonight. He is not making a journey between the two of them. He does not have to leave your child in order to be with the person who is away, and He does not have to leave that person in order to be here.

There is no traveling in it at all. He is already in both rooms, and He was in both rooms during the eleven minutes, and He was in both rooms all afternoon while nobody was talking.

That is the whole of it, and it is more than a screen ever offered.

You have been given a word that reaches further than a signal does. Scripture says nothing in all creation is hidden from Him, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a bedroom where a tablet has just gone back to its home picture.

What you do not have to say

Now the harder half, and it belongs to the parent and not to the child.

You do not know when. You may not know when for a long time. Do not fill that gap tonight with a date, or with a maybe soon, or with a shape of words that sounds like a date to a six year old. A child holds onto a promise with both hands and does not let go of it when the calendar changes, and a broken one costs far more than the silence would have.

You were not given a promise about dates, and something steadier was given instead. His word says He never leaves and never abandons, and the Holy Spirit puts that in the present tense while the calendar stays blank.

Say the true thing and stop. They are held tonight. So is your child. Both of those are facts and neither of them needs a timetable.

And while we are naming what not to say: this is not a punishment and it is not a test. Nobody in that bed did anything to cause a distance, and nobody in that bed is being examined by God to see how well they cope. A child will quietly assume both of those things if nobody says otherwise, so say otherwise, plainly, once.

You are allowed to say that you do not know. The written word says God is a very present help, and the Holy Spirit does not need your certainty in order to be in that room tonight.