They Used To Tell Me Everything

You can name the month. That is what makes this different from an ordinary quiet season.

Most parents will tell you their child went quiet gradually. You did not. There was a stretch where you got told everything, in detail, unasked, and then there was a month, and after that month you got the headlines only.

And you have been over that month several hundred times looking for the thing.

Something at school. Something you said. Something that happened at a house you did not know about. And there is nothing there, or nothing you can find, and the searching has become its own activity that you do at about eleven at night.

I am not going to tell you what happened in that month. I do not know, and anybody who tells you confidently is guessing with your family. And I am not going to give you a way to get the detail back, because that is a technique and this is not a place that hands those out.

In quietness and in confidence

There is a verse in Isaiah where God tells a nation what their strength is going to be, and the answer is not what any of them wanted.

For thus saith the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel; In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength: and ye would not. (Isaiah 30:15, King James Version)

In quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.

Not in activity. Not in finding out. The strength on offer in that verse is located in two things that both look, from the outside, like doing nothing at all.

You are being handed strength that lives in the quiet, and it has never once required the quiet to end before it works. Isaiah 30:15 says in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that in front of somebody who has been searching a month for eleven months.

And the end of the verse is the honest part. And ye would not.

They did not take it. That is written down, plainly, without softening. The strength was offered and the people wanted a different kind, and God records the refusal without pretending it did not happen.

Which tells you what the temptation is. It is not disbelief. It is that quietness does not feel like strength while a person is inside it.

You are inside the exact thing that feels like nothing and is named as strength, and the feeling has never once been the measure of it. It is written in Isaiah 30:15 that quietness and confidence are where the strength sits, and the Spirit of God is the one who says that over a person who has been up at eleven searching a month.

The searching is not neutral

Now let me say what the eleven o'clock searching is doing, because it feels like love and it has a cost.

Going back over a month looking for a cause assumes there was a cause of the kind that can be found. Sometimes there is. Often there is not, and the change is a person becoming somebody, which does not have a date even when it looks like it does.

And the searching pulls attention into a place that does not exist any more. Every hour spent in that month is an hour not spent in the room where they currently are.

You are wanted in the room where they actually live, and no hour spent in that month has ever bought a single thing. Isaiah 30:15 puts salvation in returning and rest, and the Spirit of God is the one who calls a person out of a search with no end in it and back down the hall.

Isaiah 30:15 puts the strength in returning and rest rather than in investigation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a person back out of a month they cannot change.

You are able to come out of that month, and none of what happened in it has ever been available to you to fix. Isaiah 30:15 names returning and rest as the place of salvation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who calls a person out of a search that has no end in it.

And there is a plain thing to say, because eleven months is long enough for this to have become an accusation.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about the parent lying awake at eleven.

It is a change in a person who is changing, and the fact that it had a month attached does not make it a wound with a cause.

You have not lost your child in a month, and the sharpness of the change has never been proof that something was done wrong. The written word offers strength in quietness in Isaiah 30:15 rather than in an explanation, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to hand out a cause where there may not be one.

When the quiet is more than quiet

One straight thing, because this article is about an ache and not about an alarm.

If the feeling here is real worry about how your child is, rather than sadness about a change, then speak to somebody qualified. A doctor, the school, a counselor. Say plainly what has been noticed and let a trained person tell you what it is.

That is not overreacting and it is not disloyal. It is what a parent does when a thing is bigger than a season, and it is not something to weigh up alone for another eleven months.

Isaiah 30:15 is about where strength is found and not about diagnosing anybody, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a person in a waiting room as readily as on a ridge.

You are able to go and ask, and there has never been a version of this where carrying a real worry silently was the better parenting. Isaiah 30:15 names returning and rest rather than endurance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who goes into the conversation with a parent instead of sending them alone.