We Talk Every Sunday About Nothing

Half past four, every Sunday, for about eleven years now.

You know the shape of it before it starts. She rings. You ask about the drive. She tells you what the garage said, and you say what your neighbor's son said about that same make of car, and then there is a bit about work where you do not fully understand her job and have stopped saying so. Then the weather where she is. Then the weather where you are, which is somehow always worth covering separately.

Then she says right, Mum, and you say alright then love, and that is it.

Forty minutes, every week, without fail, in weather and in bad years, and neither of you has ever missed one.

She is thirty-four. She has a mortgage and a mildly stressful job and a friend called Dee who you have never met but could pick out of a crowd from the amount you have heard about her.

Today you put the phone down and stood at the sink, and something you have never once had before came up in you.

You have never said anything over that girl. Ever.

Not when she was small, because your family did not do that. Not at her graduation, when you cried in a car park afterward and told nobody. Not in the bad year, when you rang every day and talked about the car every day on purpose so that she would have somewhere to put her hands.

You have loved her out loud for thirty-four years in the language of garages and weather, and you have never once said the thing.

He said the words stay in the mouth

Come and sit down at that table for a minute. There is no rush, it is Sunday, and I am not going to tell you those calls have been a waste.

Let me start where Scripture makes me start and where the Spirit will not let me be unkind: nobody in this is on trial, least of all you. Eleven years of never missing a Sunday is not an absence of love, and forty minutes about a garage is not nothing, whatever it sounds like written down. In the bad year you rang every day and talked about the car on purpose. That is a woman who knows exactly what she is doing. Nobody who does that has failed to love a child.

But a Sunday call is not the same as a word spoken over somebody, and you know that now, or you would not be standing at a sink about it.

So come and look at a promise that has a mouth in it.

As for me, this is my covenant with them, saith the LORD; My spirit that is upon thee, and my words which I have put in thy mouth, shall not depart out of thy mouth, nor out of the mouth of thy seed, nor out of the mouth of thy seed's seed, saith the LORD, from henceforth and for ever.Isaiah 59:21

Read what God says He does. He puts His own words in a person's mouth, and then He says where those words go: they do not leave that mouth, and they do not leave the mouth of the children, and they do not leave the mouth of the children's children. It is a promise about a family and about speech, and it does not have an age in it anywhere.

God put words in your mouth for that daughter, and they have not expired, and thirty-four is not late. That is not me being kind to a woman on a Sunday afternoon. That is what is written, and what the covenant says about whose mouth His words live in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a woman with a tea towel in her hand.

Here is what makes it possible at half past four next week. When you speak a blessing over your daughter, you are not producing anything and you are not being strange. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about her. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. Which means it does not require a special occasion, and it does not require her to be going through something, and it does not require you to have a good reason ready.

You have a word to speak over that woman that has nothing to do with the car, and no part of it depends on her still being a child. 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 finished thing out of heaven and down an ordinary phone line.

What has actually been stopping you

Now let me get at the reason, because I think you have never put it into words and it has been running eleven years of Sundays. What is written will name it, and the Spirit will be gentle about it.

It is not that you do not know what to say. It is that she is grown. There was a point, somewhere in her twenties, where saying something like that started to feel like it would land oddly. She would go quiet. She might laugh. She might ask what was wrong, because in your family a sudden serious sentence has historically meant somebody has had a diagnosis.

So the moment kept not being right, and eleven years went past, and the not-right-ness became a rule.

That is not respect for her privacy. That is a mother waiting for a moment that a mother is supposed to create, and what is written never once made a blessing something you had to wait for permission to say. The Spirit has never required an occasion.

A word spoken over a grown daughter is not out of place, and there is no age at which God's word over a person becomes inappropriate. It is written that His words stay in the mouth of the seed and the seed's seed, from henceforth and for ever (Isaiah 59:21), which is God deliberately extending it down a family line rather than leaving it in a nursery, and the same Spirit who breathed it is standing in your kitchen.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you the Sunday calls need to change, or that the garage talk was a symptom of something. Keep the car. Keep Dee. Keep the two separate weather reports, which are, frankly, the best part. What I am telling you is that thirty seconds at the end of it is available, and always has been.

What you say over her will stand over her life whether she knows what to do with it in the moment or not. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a thirty-four year old woman going quiet on a phone cannot make it less true.