In The Same Room And Somewhere Else

They are on the sofa. You are in the chair. There are about nine feet between you.

And they have been somewhere else for forty minutes.

Not rudely. There is no argument here and nothing is wrong in the way that a person could point at. They are just entirely in a place you have no address for, and every so often they laugh at something you cannot see.

And you sit there with a book you have not turned a page of in a quarter of an hour, being in the same room as your own child and being, in a way that is difficult to explain to anybody, quite lonely.

I am not going to give you a rule about the thing in their hands. This place does not hand out rules and it would not help anyway, and the ache in that room is older than anything anybody is holding.

And I am not going to tell you to make the most of them being downstairs, because that phrase turns an evening into an obligation, and you have enough of those.

Be still, and know

There is a line in Psalm 46 that everybody has on something, and the setting it comes out of is not what most people think.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)

Be still. And the psalm around it is not still at all. There are waters roaring, mountains shaking, nations raging, and a city with an army outside it.

The stillness in that verse is not the state of the room. It is a posture available to a person inside a room that is anything but.

You are able to be still in a room that is not still, and none of it has ever waited for the room to settle first. Psalm 46:10 says be still, and know that I am God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a front room where somebody has been on the same page for fifteen minutes.

And the second half is the part that carries the weight. Know that I am God.

The stillness is not for its own sake. It has an object, and the object is not your child looking up. There is somebody else in that room and He is not on a sofa and He is not somewhere else.

You have company in that room that has never once been elsewhere, and it has never depended on anybody putting anything down. It is written in Psalm 46:10 to be still and know that I am God, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a quiet evening into shared company rather than an empty one.

Being in the room is doing something

Now here is the thing worth knowing, because it will change how the next hour feels.

Being in the same room as somebody is not nothing, even when nothing is happening in it.

Ask anybody about their childhood and you will get almost no conversations. What you will get is rooms. Somebody in a kitchen. Somebody in a chair with the light on. The sound of an adult moving around downstairs.

Those memories are not made of content. They are made of presence, and presence is what you are doing right now while feeling that you are doing nothing.

Psalm 46:10 assigns stillness rather than activity, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a person that sitting there is the work rather than the failure to do the work.

You are doing the actual work of that hour, and the absence of conversation has never once meant the hour was wasted. Psalm 46:10 calls stillness a command rather than a gap, and the Holy Spirit is the one who counts presence as presence.

And there is a plain thing here, because forty minutes of this has become something about you.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about the parent sitting in that chair.

It is a young person elsewhere for an evening, which every young person in history has been, and the only thing that has changed is where elsewhere is located now.

You have not lost anything tonight, and nine feet of quiet has never once been a report on a relationship. The written word commands stillness in the middle of an uproar in Psalm 46:10, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to score an evening on how much was said in it.

The loneliness is real and it is allowed

One more thing, because there is no point talking anybody out of what is actually being felt in that chair.

That is loneliness. It is a strange kind, because it happens in company, and it is genuinely harder than being alone, and there is no point pretending it is not.

Naming it does not fix it and I am not offering it as a fix. But an unnamed feeling gets attributed to the nearest available cause, and tonight the nearest available cause is a person on a sofa who has done nothing wrong.

Psalm 46:10 gives the stillness an object other than the people in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person in a chair with a book they are not reading.

You are not alone in that room, and the loneliness in it has never once been proof that nobody is there. Psalm 46:10 puts God in the middle of the uproar, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is nine feet away in a front room at half past eight.