She Is Going Somewhere I Cannot Drive To

Eleven hours in the truck if you did it in one go, which you have already worked out and are not going to mention to anybody.

She goes Sunday. Her mother is driving her, which was decided in a five minute conversation in which nobody said the real reason and everybody understood it.

Six weeks. That is the first phase. No phone, no letters, no visits. It was explained to you both on a call by a woman who was clear and kind and had obviously explained it several thousand times, and who used the word protective about it, and who was right.

You said you understood. You do understand. You have read enough now to know why it works that way and you are not going to be the man who argues with it.

It is just that on Sunday morning she is going to get in a car, and after she gets in that car you do not get anything for six weeks. No sense of how it is going. Nothing.

And you have a minute at the car door. Maybe less. She hates goodbyes and always has, since she was about nine, and she will do the thing she does where she gets it over with quickly.

One minute, and then eleven hours of road you are not driving, and then six weeks.

You have not slept properly since Tuesday, working out what to say in it.

He goes before, and He was already there

Sit on the tailgate a minute. It is Friday. There is time and I am not going to rush you.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit is not going to be sentimental at a man who has not slept since Tuesday: six weeks of nothing is hard and I am not going to describe it as anything else. And the six weeks is right. The woman on the phone was right and you know she was right, and being right does not make it easier at a car door on Sunday.

And nobody is on trial here. Not your daughter. Not her mother, who is driving because that was the sensible arrangement. Not you.

Now come and look at a sentence somebody said to a man who was about to be left behind while the people he loved went somewhere he could not go.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

Moses says that to Joshua in front of everybody, at the point where Moses is not going into the land and Joshua is.

Look at the order of it. He it is that doth go before thee. Not comes with. Not follows after. Goes before, which means God is already at the destination before the person setting out has left.

That is what is written, and the Spirit put it there for exactly the arithmetic that has kept you awake since Tuesday. Eleven hours of road, an address you have looked at on a map about forty times, six weeks you cannot reach into.

God is not going to make that journey. He is at the other end of it already, and He was there before the paperwork was signed.

Your daughter is not going anywhere ahead of God, and there is no part of those six weeks that He has to be told about. That is not me consoling a man on a tailgate. That is what is written, and what go before actually means, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a driveway on a Friday.

Here is what nobody explains at a car door. When you speak a blessing over her, you are not sending anything with her and you are not securing the six weeks. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a woman He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not need her to be within reach for the door to be open.

A blessing said at that car reaches wherever she is on Tuesday of week three, and none of its weight is in your ability to phone. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, finished, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word from heaven eleven hours down a road without noticing the mileage.

What the minute is actually for

Now let me name it plainly, because you have been trying to solve the wrong problem since Tuesday. What is written solves a different one, and the Spirit is not asking you for the impossible.

What is written never once handed a father that job, and the Spirit has never asked for it. You have been trying to work out what to say that will do something. Something that will help, or hold her, or go with her into a building you have only seen a photograph of. That is why nothing has come, and it is why you have not slept: you have been looking for a sentence that will cover six weeks, and there is not one, and there was never going to be one.

The minute is not for that. It cannot be for that.

A blessing does something different, and it is the only kind of speech that fits a minute. It does not have to cover anything. It goes over a person and it stops, and it is complete the second it is said, and it does not spend the next six weeks being either adequate or inadequate.

That is not a lowering of the stakes and I will not present it as one. It is the right size of thing for the actual moment you have got.

God has not asked you to hold those six weeks, and He has never once made a father's send-off the thing a program's outcome rests on. It is written that the eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms (Deuteronomy 33:27), and underneath is not a place you can get to by driving, and the same Spirit who breathed that is standing in this driveway with you.

Hear what I am not doing, and this one matters. I am not telling you it goes well. I have no authority to promise you six weeks or six months or an outcome, and I am not going to trade you one for a good goodbye, and any man who does is trading in your daughter. What God does in that place is His, entirely, and it may take a shape neither of us picks.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said over her at that car that is complete before she gets in. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and twenty words at a car door in the dark is not a smaller thing than eleven hours of driving.