Where To Put The Angry

The shoe hit the wall about ten minutes ago and left a mark that will still be there in the morning.

He is eight. He has never been angry like this before, and the worst part of it is that he genuinely cannot say what it is about. When his mother asked, he said nothing, and he meant it. It really did feel like nothing. It felt like the sock that would not go on. It felt like his brother breathing too loudly at the table.

She has not been here since the spring.

Nobody in the house has said a wrong word about it. They have been careful and kind and they have talked about her often, and none of it has made the slightest difference tonight, because the thing in this room is not a misunderstanding. It is a heat, and it has nowhere at all to go.

He is lying with his face to the wall now, furious and completely worn out, and underneath the furious there is a thought he will not say out loud, because he has decided it might be the worst thing anybody has ever thought.

He is angry with her for not being here.

And he is angry with God.

His mother is on the landing with a mug going cold in her hand, doing what every parent does at this point, which is trying to work out how to talk him out of it without ever letting on that she is doing it.

She does not have to. That is the thing.

If you are the one on that landing tonight, holding your own version of the cold mug, this is written for you. Nothing about this evening needs correcting. The angry does not need arguing with and it does not need explaining and it certainly does not need putting right. It only needs somewhere to be put down.

Anger is what grief does when it has nowhere to go

Grief in a small person almost never arrives looking like sadness. It arrives as a shoe against a wall, or a door, or a flat refusal to eat something they liked last week. That is not a lapse and it is not the grief going wrong. It is grief in the only shape a body that size can make.

So the first thing is the thing not to do, and it is the natural thing: do not tidy it. Do not explain that being cross will not bring anybody back. Do not tell them she would not want them to be like this. A child who is corrected out of anger does not stop being angry. They simply take it somewhere nobody can see it, and then the one thing that was actually needed has gone.

You are not required to correct any of this tonight. Psalm 62:8 says to pour the heart out and calls God a safe place while you do it, and the Holy Spirit does not flinch at whatever comes out of an eight year old at half past eight.

Trust Him at all times. Pour out your heart to Him, because God is a safe place for us.Psalm 62:8

Read what that verse permits. Not compose your heart. Not tidy your heart. Pour it out, which is what you do with something you cannot carry any further, and it is said to a whole nation of people in a bad year, not to the calm ones.

You have somewhere to put this, and it was never meant to be you. Scripture says to cast what is too heavy onto Him because He is the one who cares, and the Holy Spirit carries what a parent standing in a doorway simply cannot hold.

And while we are here: leave out the sentences that float around at this hour. Nobody was taken. Nobody was needed somewhere else. Nobody was picked. Those sentences are not in Scripture, and what they do to a small person is cruel by accident, because they hand a child a reason to be angry with God and then quietly tell them off for being angry with God.

Sad and all right in the same evening

You were not given the job of making this make sense. His word never explains it away and never once calls it a lesson, and the Holy Spirit sits down inside the not understanding rather than tidying it up.

That is a relief you are allowed to take tonight. There is no sentence that makes it reasonable. There was never going to be one and your child is not waiting for one, whatever the question at bedtime sounds like.

What they are waiting for is permission. Permission to be furious and still be loved. Permission to laugh at something on Thursday and not have betrayed anybody by Friday.

You are allowed to be all right and to be sad on the same evening. It is written that He is close to the brokenhearted, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets both of those things be true at once without either of them being a betrayal.

Hold those two together in front of your child, because they cannot hold them on their own yet. Missing her is not a failure to be all right. Being all right for an hour is not a failure to miss her. Both are simply what love looks like from underneath, and neither of them is on trial.

You have not lost the right to say His name in this room. Scripture is full of people saying very hard things straight to God's face, and the Holy Spirit brings a prayer in exactly as it was spoken, without smoothing it first.