She Asked When We Are Moving

She packed a box.

Nobody told her to. She got a shoe box from the closet and she put in it the three things she was not prepared to let a mover touch, and she wrote on the lid in marker, and she has been keeping it under her bed since a week last Tuesday.

She asked you again at breakfast on Friday. She asked how many more sleeps.

And you said soon, baby. And you said we will see. And you went and did something at the sink with your back to the room, and your husband looked at you across the kitchen and you looked back at him and neither of you said one word.

It has been four days now.

Four days of soon and we will see and let me check the calendar. Four days of a shoe box under a bed with three things in it. And every hour it goes on, you know, the telling gets bigger, and by now you have built it into something so large in your own chest that you cannot see how to start.

And in the middle of that there is a thought you have not spoken out loud to anybody, which is that a good mother would have found a way to keep this from touching her at all.

The four days are not kindness

Let me say something hard and then let me say why I think it is safe to say it to you.

The four days were not for her.

I am not scolding you. Nothing about that is negligence and nobody could call four days careless with a child. The four days came out of love, and out of the picture in your head of her face when you say it, and that picture is unbearable, and a mother will do almost anything not to be the person who puts it there.

But while you have been not telling her, she has been going on believing. She asked at breakfast. She will ask again tonight. Every hour of not telling her is an hour of her building more onto a thing that is not coming.

You are protecting yourself from her face and calling it protecting her, and that confusion has never once made you a bad mother. It is written in Psalm 34 that the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been standing at that sink with you for four days.

And here is the part I most want you to hear. There is no version of this where she does not get sad. That option has already gone. What is still in your hands is not whether she is sad, but whether she is sad next to you or sad on her own later, having worked it out from your face.

Children read faces. She has been reading yours since Friday.

You were given that child to be honest with and not to perform for, and a mother telling the truth has never once been a mother failing her. It is written in Psalm 34 that the Lord saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, and the Spirit of God is the one who will be closer to her tonight than anybody on the stairs.

You have been carrying this alone in a room she is already standing in, and a child noticing something has never once meant you failed to hide it well enough. Psalm 34 says the Lord saveth such as be of a contrite spirit and puts Himself close rather than at a distance, and the Spirit of God is already in the room where you will tell her.

Near, not far

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice the direction of travel in it.

The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. (Psalm 34:18, King James Version)

Nigh. Near. Close by.

Read what that verse does not do. It does not say the Lord mends them that are of a broken heart immediately. It does not say He prevents the breaking. It does not say He arranges their circumstances so the heart is never in that condition.

It says He comes close to it.

That is the whole promise in that line, and it is bigger than it looks, because it tells you what God does with a sadness He is not removing. He does not stand back from it and He does not wait for it to finish. He moves toward it.

You have a God who moves toward a broken heart rather than away from one, and that has never once depended on the heart being an adult one. The written word says He is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the drawing near.

Now put your daughter in that sentence.

She is going to be sad tonight. And the promise on the page is not that she will be spared it. The promise is that God comes near to exactly that, in a small bedroom, to a seven year old with a shoe box under her bed.

You are handing her something she will use for the rest of her life, and letting a child be sad in front of you has never once been the same as hurting her. Psalm 34 puts the nearness of God directly next to the broken heart, and the Spirit of God will be nearer to her tonight than you are able to be.