He Is Emigrating and I Am Eighty-One

Thursday, twenty past six in the morning, and his mother is driving him.

He is twenty-six and it is a good job and it is a good country and there is a girl, though nobody is saying that part out loud yet. You have looked it up. It is a twenty-three hour journey with one change.

Everybody has been extremely positive about it. Your daughter has been positive in the particular way that means she has cried in a car park at some point in the last fortnight and has not mentioned it.

And underneath the whole thing, running quietly in every single person in this family, is a piece of arithmetic that nobody is going to say out loud in front of you.

You are eighty-one. Your hip is what it is. He is going to a country that costs a very great deal to get to and back from, and he is going for at least three years, which is the phrase people use when they mean an unknown number.

He will come back. Probably. At some point.

You are not being morbid. You want that understood, because your granddaughter used that word about somebody else last Christmas and you have not forgotten it. You are being accurate, which is a different thing, and you have been accurate about arithmetic since you were a girl.

And on Thursday he is going to come and crouch down in front of your chair, because that is what he does, and hug you, and say something like right, Nan.

And you have no idea what you are going to say back.

Jacob said it at a parting that was not reversed

Sit still a minute. It is only Tuesday. I am not going to tell you that three years is nothing, because you and I both know what three years is at eighty-one.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit is not going to pretend at a woman who has been accurate her whole life: the arithmetic is real. I am not going to do what everybody else is doing and be positive at you about the flight time. Nobody in this family is on trial for it either; they are being kind in the only way they can think of, and your daughter crying in a car park is not something to be corrected.

And I am not going to promise you a next time. That is not mine to promise and you would know instantly that I had made it up.

Now come and look at what a man said at a parting where both parties knew perfectly well they were not going to meet again.

The LORD watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another.Genesis 31:49

Jacob and Laban, at a heap of stones on a hillside, after twenty years and a great deal of trouble. That is a final parting. Neither of them expects to see the other, and neither of them is pretending otherwise, and the whole arrangement they are making is precisely because they will be out of each other's sight for good.

And what he says is not we will meet again. It is not a promise about the future at all.

It is a request that God keep watch across the distance. When we are absent one from another. Not if. When. The absence is assumed, and the word is spoken over the top of it.

There is a word made for exactly the parting you are facing, and it does not require anybody to pretend that the arithmetic is different. That is not me being unusually honest with an old woman. That is what Jacob said and at what kind of parting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a front room on a Tuesday.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing somebody going. When you speak over that boy at the door, you are not securing anything and you are not promising him a return. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a man He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it, and He is already in that country and He does not need a flight.

A blessing said at a door on Thursday reaches wherever he goes, and none of its weight is in your ability to be there. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word twenty-three hours with one change without noticing the distance.

What everybody is trying to spare you

Now let me name it kindly, because your family is doing something well meant and it has left you with nothing to say.

They are being positive because they do not want to hand an eighty-one year old woman a sum. That is love, badly aimed. And the effect of it is that the actual situation has become unmentionable, and a thing that cannot be mentioned cannot be spoken over.

So on Thursday there will be a boy crouching in front of your chair, and a room full of people determinedly cheerful, and you with the only accurate view in the house and no permitted way to say anything true.

A blessing solves that, and it is the only thing that does, because it does not require you to say the sum and it does not require you to deny it either. It goes over the top of the whole question. It works if he comes back next spring and it works if he does not.

That is not a way of avoiding the truth and I will not sell it as one. It is a form of words built for people in exactly your position, several thousand years ago, by people who buried each other a long way from home.

God is not asking you to be positive on Thursday, and He has never once made a cheerful send-off the condition of a blessing landing. It is written that the eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27), which is Moses speaking over a people at the very end of his own life on the day he was going to die, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in this front room now.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you that you will see him again in this life. I do not know that and neither do you and neither does anybody in that family, and I am not going to hand a woman of eighty-one a comfort I cannot stand behind. And I am not telling you that saying this makes the parting easier at half past six on Thursday morning.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said over that boy that travels the whole distance and does not depend on either of you being anywhere. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a woman in a chair saying twenty words at twenty past six is putting something on a man that gets off the plane with him.