The Window at the Usual Hour

Ten past five is not a time of day in that house. It is a sound.

It is the gate, then three steps, then a key. Andres has known that sequence since before he could count, and he knows it the way a person knows their own name, which is to say he has never once had to think about it.

Somebody who lives in that house is not in it at the moment. This is not going to say why, and that is on purpose, because it is a different reason in every house and the window is the same window in all of them.

What matters here is the ten past five.

Because at about ten past five, Andres stops whatever he is doing and goes into the front room and puts both hands on the windowsill and looks down the road at the exact spot where a person would first appear. He does not announce it. He does not make anything of it. His mother has watched him do it eleven days running and has never once said a word about it, because what would she say.

He does not stay long. Two minutes. Sometimes three. Then he goes back to whatever it was he was doing, and the evening carries on.

And then at bedtime, after the lamp, he asks the same question in the same flat voice, and it is not really a question about arrival times at all.

"Where are they right now?"

Right now. Not when. He is six, and what he is actually asking is whether that person still exists in the same world he is lying in, at this exact minute, while he is here with the blanket up and the light off.

And if you are the one on the edge of that bed, you already know the trap sitting inside that question. The honest answer to when is that you do not know. You have promised yourself you will not invent one, and you were right to promise that, because a child keeps whatever a grown up hands them and they keep it exactly as long as it takes to turn out wrong.

So here is the better news, and it is genuinely better than a date.

Nobody has to answer when tonight. Right now has an answer, and right now is what your child asked for.

Right now has an answer

Start with the thing that is actually true at this minute, because it is the only ground in the room that will hold weight.

God is not somewhere in the middle, halfway between that house and wherever the other person is, doing His best to cover both. He is not commuting. He is entirely here and entirely there, at the same time, in the same minute, without dividing Himself and without leaving anybody.

That is the connection between those two people tonight. Not the phone. Not the calendar. One Person, in both rooms, at once.

You are not required to have an answer to when, and when was never the real question. Acts 17:27 says He is not far from any one of us, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes not far mean this bedroom and that other place in the very same minute.

He is not far from any one of us.Acts 17:27

Read the words any one. Not the nearest one. Not the one whose situation is simplest to explain. Any one, which covers the person in that bed and the person who is not in the house, at the same time, with nothing thinning out in between.

You have something better than a date to give away tonight. Scripture says there is nowhere anybody can go where God is not already there ahead of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding both ends of that at the same moment.

What this does not say, and why that matters

It does not say when. It never will, and any version of this that quietly slips a date in has stopped being kind.

It does not promise the coming back, either. Sit with that for a second, because everything in a parent wants to hand a child that sentence at the door of sleep, and it is the one sentence that must not be handed over unless it is certain. A child remembers a promise with a terrifying accuracy. Missing somebody is survivable. Being told something by the person you trust most and having it not happen is a different kind of injury, and it lasts.

You were not the one who arranged this absence, and neither was the small person in that bed. His word says God goes before us and comes behind us and lays His hand on us, and the Holy Spirit is doing exactly that in two places tonight without leaving either of them.

And it is not a punishment. It is not a test. Nobody is away because of anything a six year old did, said, forgot or felt, and no child should ever be left holding that arithmetic in the dark. If the thought has already arrived in that room, it gets answered plainly and out loud, tonight, and it gets answered before anything else does.

You are allowed to say that you do not know, and it costs your child nothing. Scripture says God is faithful and does not lie, and the Holy Spirit makes an honest sentence land safer in a small person than a hopeful one ever does.