Saving It All Up

There is a jam jar on the shelf above the bed with about nine folded pieces of paper in it.

You know what they are because you found the first one on the stairs. Small torn corners, a sentence each, in the handwriting that still leans backwards. I got picked for the relay. Miss said my volcano was the best one. There is a fox living under the shed.

He has not told you any of it.

Not because he is sulking. He started to tell you the fox thing once, stopped halfway, said he was saving it, and wrote it down instead. He is seven. He has decided, without saying so and without anybody suggesting it, that nothing good counts until the person who is away is here to hear it.

So he is banking his life. Every decent thing that happens to him goes in the jar.

And tonight, at the end of a day where something genuinely good happened, he lay down on his side facing the wall and said the sentence that took the legs out from under you.

"I do not want to have a nice day without them."

There was a thing you might have said about being allowed to be happy, and it sounded thin before it got out of your mouth, so you left it. And underneath sits the question you cannot answer and will not fake: he wants to know when. Nobody in this house knows when, and you would rather stand there with nothing than hand a small person a date you cannot keep.

So you said nothing much, straightened the blanket, and came out.

Here is what you need for tomorrow night, and it is not a date and it is not a pep talk. It is one true thing about where God is standing right now, and it fits in about ten words.

What the jar is actually for

A child saving up their days is not being dramatic. They are doing something quite reasonable with the only tools they have.

Somewhere in their thinking, joy has to be shared or it goes to waste, like a cake nobody cut. So they hold it. They hold the relay and the volcano and the fox, and they hold their own face still at the school gate, and the holding costs them all day. Then it gets to bedtime and the whole weight comes off at once, into a pillow, in one sentence.

The instinct is to talk them out of it. Please do not. Cheering up is a job, and a child who is handed that job at half past seven has to perform it for you, and now there are two things on their shoulders instead of one.

You are not the one who has to make this all right by bedtime, and there is no repair job here for you to fail at. Psalm 139 says there is nowhere a person can go from His Spirit, and it is the Holy Spirit who is standing in both of those rooms tonight, without hurrying and without choosing between them.

The other instinct is to make a promise. The date, the countdown, the it-will-not-be-long. Do not do that either, however much you want to. A child who has been given a date starts guarding it, and a date that slips is a second loss on top of the first.

There is a third thing, and it is the true one.

The Lord keep watch between me and you, while we are apart from one another.Genesis 31:49

Two people said that to each other in the middle of a field, at the exact moment they were going different ways and neither of them knew for how long. It is not a farewell. Read it again. It is a job being handed to somebody big enough for it: while we cannot see each other, He is watching both ends.

You have a true thing to say that needs no calendar behind it. Scripture says He is a very present help, and the Holy Spirit is what makes the word "present" mean here and there in the very same minute.

The same minute in two places

This is the part a seven year old can actually hold, and it is worth saying with your ordinary voice, not your serious one.

It is the same minute in both places. Right now, while this room is dark and the landing light is on, the person who is away is somewhere in their own now. Not in the past, not in the future, in the same minute as this bed. And God is not commuting between them, arriving here when He leaves there. He is in both rooms at once, all night, at full attention in each.

That is what the watch on the pillow is for, and why it is better if it still ticks.

You were never the one holding those two places together. Genesis 31:49 is written as a blessing between two people walking off in different directions, and His Spirit is the one keeping that watch at both ends of it.

And then the second half, which is the part that lets a child put the jar down.

Having a good day is not disloyal. A child needs telling that plainly, because nobody has told them and they have quietly ruled otherwise. The relay and the volcano and the fox are not a betrayal of anybody. They are just Tuesday, and Tuesday is allowed to be good.

You are allowed to let your child enjoy their own life, and that permission does not have to be earned from anybody. Scripture says every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, and the Holy Spirit hands those gifts out on ordinary weekdays without first checking who is at home.