Is It Night There Too

The cap lives on his pillow now.

It came off a hook by the door about three weeks ago and it has not gone back. It is far too big for him, and the brim is frayed along one edge where somebody used to bend it, and at some point every evening he sets it down beside his head with the frayed edge turned toward him.

Nobody in that house made a rule about the cap. It simply started.

He is six. He does not ask the question the grown ups keep bracing for. He does not ask when. He asked when twice in the first week, and he got the answer everybody gets, which is the honest one and the useless one at the same time, and he has not asked it since.

What he asked tonight, with the lamp still on and one hand flat on the brim, was this.

"Is it night there too?"

His mother said she thought so. Probably.

"So it is dark there."

"Probably."

He was quiet a while, and then came the sentence underneath the whole thing, and it came out flat, the way the real ones always do.

"Who is sitting with them?"

And there it was. He was not frightened for himself. He had a lamp and a duvet and a person sitting on the end of his bed. He had done the arithmetic a six year old does, and he had worked out that if it is dark there, and he is here, then somebody he loves is out in that dark with nobody at all, and he had been carrying it around since teatime.

His mother did not know who was sitting with them. She did not know the room. She did not know the hour. She could not promise a day and she was not going to invent one at half past seven.

So she said the one thing she actually knew.

"God is there. Right where they are. And God is here."

He turned the frayed brim over in his fingers.

"At the same time?"

"He does not do it one at a time, my love."

That is the two minutes this was written for. Not a lesson about being brave. One small boy, one worn out cap, and one question nobody in the house wanted asked out loud.

The job he has quietly taken on

Let me name this plainly, because it is easy to mistake for homesickness and it is not homesickness.

Your child is not sad for himself tonight. Your child is sad on somebody else's behalf, which is a much heavier thing, and small people take that job on without telling anybody. It starts as love and it turns into a duty in about four days, and then a six year old is lying in the dark at bedtime doing the emotional work of an adult who is not even in the building.

You are watching a small person carry a weight nobody handed them. Scripture says to cast every single care on Him because He cares for you, and it is the Holy Spirit who lifts that weight off a small chest, never a good explanation from a parent.

That is the release, and it needs saying plainly, because a child will not work it out alone. Keeping somebody company from a bed three hours away is not a job a six year old holds. It is not a job anybody holds. Missing somebody is allowed and it is right and it is love. But being responsible for how they feel tonight was never given to your child, and if it has quietly been picked up, it can quietly be put back down.

The Lord keep watch between you and me, while we are away from each other.Genesis 31:49

That line is very old. Two men said it standing on a heap of stones, about to go different ways, neither one able to follow the other and neither one able to promise anything.

Notice what they did with that. They did not swear to write. They did not fix a date. They asked God to be the one keeping watch in the gap, and then they went, and the watch was His.

You have permission to be a parent who does not know, and it takes nothing away from you. His word says He is near to everyone who calls on Him, and the Holy Spirit is at work in two rooms at the same hour, including the one nobody in this house has ever seen.

God does not travel to get there

Here is the second thing, and this is the one that settles a child.

We picture God the way we picture a person, because a person is what we have to work with. A person is either here or there. A person crosses a distance to arrive, and while they are crossing it, one of the two rooms is empty of them.

God is not doing that. He did not leave here to be there. He is not going to arrive later where the person you love is lying down tonight, because He was already in that room before anybody in this house started worrying about it.

You were never the thread holding this family together across that distance. It is written that in Him all things hold together, and the Spirit does that holding in the place where none of us can go and none of us can look.

And this is why we never say when. Not because honesty is unkind, but because a date given at bedtime becomes a promise by morning, and a child keeps the receipt. What can be said tonight, without a single word of invention in it, is who is with them.

You have already handed your child the only answer that does not expire. Scripture says there is nowhere on the earth or under it where a person can get away from His presence, and the Holy Spirit makes that a plain fact in a room your child will never stand in.