He did not shout. That is the part that has taken the ground out from under you.
He came round on a Wednesday, at about four, which is not a time anybody comes round, and he did not take his coat off, and he stood in the hall rather than going through, and he said it.
He said he has thought about it for a long time. He said this is not a decision he has made in a temper and he wants you to know that. He said he is not going to explain it and that any explanation would turn into an argument and he is not doing that.
And he said: please do not ring, and please do not turn up.
He was not cruel. He was gentle, which was worse. He asked after your hip. He said, at the end, that he hoped you were all right, and he meant it, and then he stepped back out onto the path.
He is thirty-four. He is a grown man and he has decided.
And you are standing in that doorway now with the door still open and he is about six feet away doing up his coat, and this is the last thirty seconds you are going to get, and everything you can think of to say is either begging or a question.
Underneath is not a place you can reach
Stay in the doorway. Do not go down the path. I am not going to hand you an argument and I am not going to tell you how to change his mind.
Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not have me lying to a woman standing in her own front door: this is a real thing that is really happening, and it may not reverse. I am not going to promise you that he rings at Christmas. And there will be no case built here against your son, who has done nothing in this article except say something calmly at a door, and no case built against you either.
And there is one thing I will not do at all, and I want it stated before anything else, because at this exact moment somebody will offer it to you. I will not give you words to speak at that man's will. Nothing said in this article, and nothing on this whole site, is a way of turning a person round with a sentence. His will is his own before God and it is not a mountain and it is not available to be commanded. Anybody who hands you words to aim at your son's decision is handing you a spell, and it will not work, and it would be wrong if it did.
Now come and look at the shortest promise in the Bible about the ground under a person.
The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27
Moses says that at the very end of his life, in a blessing over people he is not going with.
And look at where God is placed in it. Not beside. Not ahead, and not behind. Underneath.
Which is the one position you cannot occupy. You can follow somebody. You can wait for them, and write to them, and stand at a window. You cannot get underneath a person. That is a place a mother has never been able to reach and was never designed to.
Wherever your son goes from that path, the arms are already under him, and underneath is precisely the place you were never going to be able to be. That is not me consoling a woman at a door. That is what is written and where the verse puts Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a front step at four o'clock on a Wednesday.
Here is what nobody explains at a door like this one. When you speak a blessing over him, you are not calling him back and you are not making a bid. 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 coming through it, and it costs your son nothing and asks him for nothing and does not require him to change his mind.
A blessing does not violate a single thing he asked for, and it is the one thing you can do in the next thirty seconds that is not contact. 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 from heaven to a man who has asked not to be rung.
Why begging and questions are the only things coming
Now let me name it, because both of those are in your mouth right now and neither of them is a fault.
Begging and questions are what a person reaches for when they are trying to keep somebody. They are both bids to change an outcome, and at this moment your whole body is organized around one purpose, which is preventing him from walking down that path.
That is not manipulation and I am not going to call it that. It is a mother, and it is thirty-four years old, and it started the first time he went out of your sight.
But he has asked, and he has asked calmly, and both of those options would spend the last thirty seconds you have got against the one thing he specifically requested. What is written has never once asked a mother to override a grown man, and the Spirit does not work that way either.
A blessing does something else entirely. It is not a bid. It does not attempt to keep him. It is the only sentence available that respects the whole of what he just said and still has something good in it, and it is the only one that will not become, in his memory in six months, a reason he was right to go.
God has not asked you to hold on to that man, and He has never once made a mother's persuasion the mechanism by which anybody comes home. It is written that He devises means, that His banished be not expelled from Him (2 Samuel 14:14), which is God taking the engineering as His own work, and the same Spirit who breathed that is standing in this doorway with you.
Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you he comes back. That is not mine and I will not trade it to you for a good goodbye. And I am not telling you what he is thinking or why, because I do not know and neither does anybody except him and God.
What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said in the next thirty seconds that will still be true in ten years whether or not he ever rings. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and twenty words said to a man doing up his coat on a path is not nothing to send after him.
So here is what is true in that doorway, with about thirty seconds left.
The blessing exists. God settled it in Christ before that man was born, it is written down where anybody can go and read it, and the Holy Spirit is here on this step. What is missing is not the words, and it is certainly not your love for your son, which is the entire reason this is unbearable. What is missing is twenty words that are not a bid.
You are permitted to bless a man who has just told you he is leaving, and his decision does not disqualify you from it. Nobody has ever had to be wanted to be used for this. Faith is an open hand and not a performance, God is the one who fills the hand, and the Spirit does the carrying; what He carries is what is written.
I am not going to tell you what happens to your son, or whether he rings, or when, or ever. That belongs to God, and He devises means and He has never published the timetable, and anybody who hands you one is taking something from you at the worst hour of your life. What I can tell you is what is already settled, because it is written and I am only reading it out where you can hear it: the everlasting arms are underneath, which is the one position you were never going to be able to occupy, and Moses said that over people he was not going with.
He is doing up his coat. Say it now, while he can still hear you.
Declare this over yourself
Say these standing in your own kitchen, out loud, after he has gone, because a blessing is spoken and not thought. You have the standing to say them, and not because he stayed. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak God's word over your own son is His authority, handed to you and carried by His Spirit. Scripture says whoever speaks to the mountain and does not doubt shall have what he says. Says. Out loud. So say it here, to a Wednesday afternoon at four o'clock that you did not see coming. What God does in that man is His to decide, and none of it is yours to produce.
- Sentence he said on this step, you are his to say and you are not the last word over him. Scripture says the eternal God is thy refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms, and underneath is a place I was never going to reach.
- Begging and questions that were in my mouth on that doorstep, get out of this house in the name of Jesus. It is written that God devises means that His banished be not expelled from Him, and the engineering was always His and never mine.
- Lord, You are underneath my son this afternoon and You do not need my permission or his. I thank You, because Your face is shining on him and Your Spirit is the one carrying it, and I said it out loud from my own doorway while he could still hear me.
Deuteronomy 33:27
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