Right Now, Where They Are

There is a chair at that kitchen table that nobody has sat in for a while, and everybody in the house has quietly agreed to keep walking past it without saying anything.

The boy is seven, and he has a system.

Every night, once the light is off, he goes through the list. He starts at the small things and works up, and he does not let himself finish the last few, but he gets close enough to feel his heart change gear. He is not doing it to frighten himself. He worked out, somewhere in the last few weeks, that if he can think of everything then nothing can take him by surprise, and being taken by surprise is the part he cannot stand. So the list gets longer, and it runs later.

His mother is in the doorway with the landing light behind her. She has already done the water. She has already said the good, sensible things about how everything is fine.

And from under the blanket, in a very level voice, he asks the question she has been dreading all week. He asks what happens if something happens.

She could say nothing is going to happen. She has said it before and neither of them believed it, and she has noticed that it does not settle him for more than about a minute, because he is seven and he is not stupid and the world has already shown him one or two things.

So she comes in and sits on the floor with her back against the bed, which is where she does her best thinking at that hour, and the clock in the hall clicks over to the next minute.

And that clock is the whole thing, though she does not know it yet.

If you are the one on that floor tonight, holding a question you cannot answer, this is written for you. You have not run out of true things to say. You have only run out of the ones that come with a guarantee, and there was never a guarantee in your hands to give.

What the list is actually for

That list your child recites in the dark is not naughtiness and it is not drama. It is arithmetic. A small person has noticed that they cannot see somebody they love, and they are trying to close the gap with the only tool they have, which is thinking about it harder.

It never closes. That is the part that keeps them awake. There is no amount of thinking that reaches across a distance, so the list runs all night and finishes nowhere.

Which means the answer cannot be a better forecast. It has to be a different kind of sentence altogether.

You are not lying to your child when you tell them God is with that person right now. Psalm 139:9 puts a man out at the far side of the sea and finds God's hand already there, and it is the Holy Spirit who turns a verse about distance into a plain fact about tonight.

If I ride the wings of the morning and settle on the far side of the sea, even there Your hand will lead me, and Your right hand will hold me.Psalm 139:9 and 10

Notice what that verse does not do. It does not say the journey is short. It does not say the sea is calm. It says the hand is already there, at the far end, before anybody arrives.

You were never handed tomorrow, and nobody ever asked you to carry it. Scripture gives bread for the day and for the day only, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a tired parent inside the day they were actually given.

That is worth saying twice at eleven at night. The thing your child is asking you to guarantee was never yours. You cannot see the far side of the sea either. What you can see is this minute, and this minute is the one God is in.

The same minute, in two places

Here is the thing the clock in the hall is doing, and it is the only geography a seven year old needs.

It is not a different night where that person is. It is this night. The minute that just clicked over in your hall is the same minute that is happening wherever they are. Two rooms, one minute, and God awake in both of them at once without having to hurry between the two.

You are allowed to say I do not know. His word never once asks a parent to forecast, and the Holy Spirit does not need a promise from you in order to carry a true sentence into a small person.

That is the release for you, and please take it. A child who is told a thing that turns out not to be so has learned something about a parent that takes a long time to repair, and the risk was never necessary, because the true sentence is stronger than the guaranteed one anyway.

You have one sentence that works in both houses at the same time. Psalm 139:10 says His hand holds at any distance at all, and the Holy Spirit makes that one sentence true in this bedroom and in theirs in the very same minute.

And then say nothing else. The sentence does the work on its own, and the reassurance underneath it would only be a way of filling a silence that your child does not find uncomfortable.