Still Thinking About It

You put your head round the door at half past eight, because the strip of light under it has not gone off.

She is flat on her back with her arms straight down at her sides like a small soldier, eyes open, looking at the ceiling.

You ask her what is wrong and she says nothing is wrong. And you already know what it is, because you were there at four o'clock when it happened, and it was over by ten past, and you told her then that it was alright, and you meant it, and you have not thought about it once since.

She has thought about nothing else for four and a half hours.

That is the part nobody warns you about. A grown person can put a thing down. A child under a duvet at half past eight is still holding it, turning it over, running it again from the top, waiting for the second telling off. The real one. The one they are certain is coming later, when everybody has had time to work out how bad it actually was.

She is not afraid of the dark tonight. She is afraid that it is not finished.

And you are standing in the doorway with a cup of tea going cold in your hand, and you have already said the words once, and you do not know how to say them again in a way that lands.

What a child is waiting for in the dark

A note for you first, before the part you read out.

The ache tonight is not the thing that happened. The thing that happened is small and it is over and it does not need one more word from anybody. The ache is the waiting. A child who has been forgiven at four o'clock and does not yet know how to feel forgiven at half past eight is not being difficult and is not sulking. She is doing the one piece of arithmetic her heart knows how to do: something was wrong, and somebody has to pay for it, and nobody has, so it must still be owed.

You cannot argue a child out of that. I have watched grown men do the same arithmetic at fifty. It does not answer to reasoning. It answers to somebody with authority saying, out loud and in the room, that the account is closed.

So here is what God says about distance, and it is worth reading slowly, because He chose His two directions carefully.

As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our rebellions from us.Psalm 103:12

Not north and south. If you walk north long enough you reach the top of the world and every step after that is south, and the two meet. He did not say north and south.

East and west never meet. You can walk east your whole life and never once begin to walk west. There is no place on this earth where they come together, and there is no year, and there is no half past eight at night. That is the distance He chose, and He chose it on purpose, and He did not choose it for grown ups only.

And notice who does the moving. He has removed it. Not she has removed it, once she is sorry enough. Not you have removed it, if you say it in the right voice. He has. It is already done and it was done by Him and the doing is not waiting on how she feels about it.

And you are telling her something that was finished before bedtime started. Psalm 103:12 says He has removed our transgressions as far as the east is from the west, and the Spirit is the one who makes removed feel removed to a six year old.

There is a second thing hiding under a child's ceiling at this hour, and it is the bigger one. Not, am I forgiven. But, will it come back up. Children keep score because they have watched grown ups keep score. A child who fears the reckoning is only postponed needs to hear that God does not keep a second copy of a thing He has already taken away.

He is not cross with her. He is not going to bring it up. Those two sentences are the whole message, and everything else on this page is just carrying them across the room to her.