Words At The Door For A Leaving Child

The car is loaded and it took two goes, and there is a thing wedged behind the seat that is going to fall over on the first roundabout.

He has been rehearsing since about Tuesday.

Nothing has survived. He has tried, in the shower and in the van and once out loud in the shed, and every version has come out as one of two things.

Either it is too big. It goes back to when she was four, and gets into what he actually thinks about her, and by the third sentence he is not going to be able to speak, and he can see her face while he cannot speak, and he is not doing that to her on a driveway.

Or it is an instruction. Ring your mother. Do not leave the immersion on. Look after yourself, which sounds like nothing and is in fact everything he cannot say, compressed into four syllables that mean nothing at all.

And there is a third one, which is what has actually happened at three previous departures in this family, and which he is quietly terrified of.

He says nothing. He puts a bag in, and he says something about the traffic and the route and the roadworks after junction eleven, and he stands there with his hands moving, and then she drives off and he goes back into the house.

He has about four seconds coming and nine hundred things.

He shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in

Stand by the boot a minute, because there is a line at the end of a traveling psalm that is exactly the right size for a driveway, and its shape is the whole answer.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.Psalm 121:8

Now look at what it does not do.

It does not tell the traveler anything. There is no instruction in it. Nothing about the route, nothing about ringing anybody, nothing about being careful, and no advice of any kind is offered to the person who is going.

And it does not go backwards either. It does not review the relationship or say what the years have been. It stands at a departure and it says something over a person about what is being kept.

That is why it has been said at doors for three thousand years, and it is why every version you rehearsed since Tuesday failed: you were reaching for a summary, and this is not a summary, it is a covering.

Hear this on the driveway. You are not short of words, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture hands you a sentence built exactly for the four seconds you have, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it over a car and down a motorway, and it has been doing this job at doorways for longer than your family has existed.

Now let me say something about the too big version, because you were right to reject it and you should know why.

Everything in it is true. That is not the problem. The problem is that it puts a weight on her, at a door, that she has nowhere to put down, and she is about to drive for four hours.

A blessing goes on the traveler. A summary goes into the traveler, and there is a difference, and one of them is a gift and the other one is a suitcase.

Hear this too, and let it take the pressure off. You do not have to say what the years were, and Scripture is what says so. What is written blesses the going out and the coming in without one backward glance, and the Spirit of God has never once required a father to compress twenty years into four seconds.

And now the third possibility, the silence, because that is the family pattern and you named it yourself and that is more than most people manage.

Three departures with nothing said, and every one of them by a good man who loved his children and had nine hundred things, and who talked about the roadworks after junction eleven.

That pattern breaks in one direction only: somebody has to be the first to say a sentence, and it is not going to break itself, and it does not care how well the sentence is delivered.