When You Cannot Picture Their Face

He had been doing it every night for weeks, and nobody in the house knew.

Lights off, eyes shut, and then the attempt. He would try to put the whole face together, the way you would build something out of the pieces in a box, and every night a bit more of it came out wrong. He could get the coat. He could get the laugh, or at least the shape of the sound. He could get one hand and the way it went round a mug.

The face kept arriving as the face in the photograph on the shelf downstairs, which is not the same thing at all, and he knew it was not the same thing, and that was the part that frightened him.

Somebody he loved had been away since the spring. This message is not going to say why, because it is not the same reason in every house, and the ache underneath is the same one whichever it is.

His grandmother found him crying about it on a Tuesday and could not get a word out of him for twenty minutes. When it finally came, it came out sideways, the way the big ones do.

"I think I am forgetting them."

She sat very still for a second, because she understood immediately that he was not sad. He was ashamed. Somewhere in his six year old arithmetic, a face going blurry meant he had let go of a person on purpose, and he had been carrying that on his own since about the middle of the summer.

She did not say of course you are not. She did not go and get the photograph and start a lesson with it, which was her first instinct and would have turned bedtime into an exam he was already failing.

She just sat down on the floor by the bed, and she waited, and then she said one true thing, twice, slowly.

That is the room this is written for. One ordinary bedroom, one small person quietly convinced that a blurry picture is a kind of betrayal, and a grown up with nothing prepared.

There is something true about that room, and it is worth having ready before the light goes off.

The forgetting is not a betrayal

Start here, because everything else in this message rests on it.

A young memory is not a filing cabinet. It is more like a hand holding water, and it is not holding badly, it is doing exactly what a small hand does. A face that has gone soft at the edges after months is not a verdict on how much a child loves somebody. It is a six year old brain being six.

Children do not know that. What a child concludes, alone, at night, is that the blurriness is their own fault and that it means something about them. That is the ache under the tears, and it is almost never the one they can say out loud.

And you are watching a small person grieve something they cannot even name. Isaiah 49:16 says God has a name written on the palms of His hands, and the Holy Spirit puts that within reach of a child long before anybody manages to explain it.

See, I have written your name on the palms of My hands.Isaiah 49:16

Written on the hands. Not remembered when there is time for it, not filed somewhere and fetched out. Held, in the open, permanently, by somebody whose memory does not go soft at the edges after a season.

You have nothing to correct here and nothing to fix. Scripture puts the remembering in God's hands rather than in ours, and the Holy Spirit does the holding while a small memory carries on doing what small memories do.

So no quizzes. No sitting up with the photographs to test whether the picture is still in there, however kindly it is meant. That turns a soft ache into an examination, and the child fails it in front of the person they were trying not to disappoint.

Somebody else is holding the face

Here is the turn, and it is the whole message.

The child is trying to keep a person alive by holding a picture, which is a heavy job for a small person and a job that was never theirs. Somebody else is doing it, and He is doing it perfectly, and He was doing it all summer while a boy lay in the dark thinking the whole thing depended on him.

You were handed a true sentence that does not depend on the calendar. His word says God is with them right now, and the Holy Spirit is in that place and in this room at the very same moment.

Notice what that sentence carefully does not say. It does not say when anybody is coming back, and it does not say that they are. A child remembers a promise like that with a terrible accuracy, and a promise a house cannot keep does more damage than the blurry face ever did. Presence is the thing that is true tonight and stays true tomorrow, whatever tomorrow holds.

You are allowed to leave the return completely unpromised. Scripture is full of God being present and remarkably quiet about dates, and the Holy Spirit settles a child on the presence rather than on the timetable.

And nothing here asks the child to stop missing them. Missing somebody is love with nowhere to put itself down. It is not a problem to be solved at bedtime and it is not a sign that anything has gone wrong.