I Am Not Going To Talk You Out Of It

There is a particular sound a small person makes on the stairs at two in the morning. It is not running. It is quick and flat footed, and it stops halfway down, as if she has just remembered that she is allowed to come.

Her father was already awake by the time she got to his door.

She stood there holding the frame with both hands and said the only thing she had. It is following me.

He knew what he was supposed to say. He had said it on Tuesday. It was only a dream. It is not real. It cannot follow you, love, it does not have legs. Every one of those sentences was true, and they held for about the length of the hallway. Then she was back at his door with the same four words.

You cannot win that one. Nobody is reasoned out of a feeling at two in the morning, and adults are worse at it than children are.

So this time he did not argue with her.

He also did not ask her what it was about, and that matters more than it looks. She had not asked to describe it. She had asked for company, and there is no version of a dark hallway in which telling it again makes it smaller.

What he said was this. I am not going to talk you out of it.

She looked up at him. Nobody had said that to her before. Every grown up so far had come at her with a reason, and reasons had bounced off her chest all week, and here was one who was not going to try.

Then he put his feet on the cold floor and said, come on. Let us go and look at your room.

They put the lamp on. They looked at the room together, unhurried, the way you look at something you own. The bed, the shelf, the curtain, the pile of clothes on the chair that neither of them was going to deal with tonight. He turned the lamp off. He sat on the edge of the bed. He did not say anything clever, because he did not have anything clever, and it turned out not to be the thing that was needed.

That hallway is what this is written for. Two in the morning, a child who will not be talked out of it, and a parent whose true sentences have all been used.

There is one more sentence, and it is a different kind. It is worth having in your mouth before tonight.

Stop arguing, and stand beside her

Hear what your child is actually claiming, because it is not what it sounds like.

When she says it is following her, she is not filing a report about the corridor. She is telling you that the feeling came out of the dream with her, and about that she is completely right. The feeling is real. It is in her chest at this moment. What it is not is a description of the room she is standing in.

That is the whole seam of this thing, and it is worth going slowly over. The dream was real to feel. It is not real now. Those two sentences do not fight each other, and holding both of them at once is the difference between arguing with your child and standing next to her.

You are free tonight from having to win anything. Scripture says peace is given rather than argued for, because Jesus said my peace I give you, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that peace into a small chest at two in the morning while a parent simply sits there.

Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give the way the world gives. Do not let your heart be troubled, and do not be afraid.John 14:27

Notice the order in that line. He does not open a case. He hands something over. Peace arrives as a gift from a Person, not as the last point in a good argument, which is a mercy, because at two in the morning nobody has a good argument left.

And you have a room here that the dream has no claim on. Psalm 121:4 says the One who watches over you does not doze off and does not sleep, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that plain old line true in a real bedroom in a real house tonight.

Somebody was already in there

Here is the part a child needs most, and it is almost never the part we reach for.

She is not only frightened of the dream. She is frightened of having been alone in it. That is the wound underneath the wound, and it is exactly why she is standing at your door instead of pulling the blanket up. She went somewhere without you, and it was bad there, and she could not call.

You are holding a child who was not on her own in there. His word says the Lord is close to the broken hearted, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries that into a small person who is still breathing too fast to listen properly.

The whole time it was happening, God was with her. Not afterwards. Not now that she has reached the hallway and found you. The whole time. He was not asleep for the part she cannot put into words, and He was not standing outside the door of it waiting for her to wake up. He does not keep the day and leave the night to itself.

You have permission to say one plain sentence instead of five good ones. Scripture says His strength is made perfect in weakness, and the Spirit does more with a flat, tired, unimpressive line than a brilliant explanation ever managed.

And you were handed real standing in this house tonight. Psalm 4:8 says I lie down and sleep in peace, because the Lord alone keeps me safe, and it is the Holy Spirit doing the keeping while everyone in the building sleeps.