The Amen Arrives Three Seconds Late

The first thing that happens is the arithmetic, and it happens in somebody's head every single week.

It is nine there and four here, or it is four there and nine here, and one of you is eating and one of you is not, and one of you has just got in and one of you has been up for hours. Somebody always says the sum out loud, every week, as though it might have changed since last week, and somebody else always says no, they went forward, and there is a small argument about clocks, and it is genuinely the same argument, and nobody minds.

Then the phone goes up against the jug. It has to be the jug. There is a whole engineering tradition in that kitchen about which object holds a phone at the right angle, and the jug won years ago.

At the other end the phone is being held, not propped, and it is being held far too close, so what everybody can see is a forehead, a bit of ceiling, and occasionally an eye. Nobody has ever successfully explained the angle to her and nobody is going to try again now, because the forehead has become part of it, and if she ever got the angle right somebody would ask what was wrong.

A child comes in, says hello without stopping, and goes out. Somebody eats through the whole call. There is a stretch where two people talk over each other for ninety seconds and neither one is aware of it. And then it goes quiet, and somebody says shall we pray, and everybody sorts themselves out.

And the prayer is short and mostly the same, and the lag is exactly what it always is. So somebody says amen at one end, and it arrives at the other end three seconds later, and the second amen goes back and arrives three seconds after that, and nobody in that family has finished a prayer at the same moment as anybody else in eleven years. It is a family liturgy now. Everybody knows it and nobody has ever named it out loud.

You know that call. You are probably the one who keeps it. You are the one who holds the time difference in your head and sends the message on the Wednesday and knows who is likely to forget.

And somewhere in you, quietly, sits a verdict you have never said to anybody: that this is the reduced version. The improvised one. A family altar held together with a jug and a bad connection, and one that would not count if anybody were marking it properly.

Most of the New Testament Was Posted

Let me put something in your hands before we go anywhere near your kitchen.

The man who did more than anybody to hold the first churches together did most of it by not being there. He was in a different city, or a different province, or a prison, and what he had was a sheet of paper, a courier who might take months, and no idea whether any of it had arrived.

He knew what that felt like, and he said so plainly. He told one church he was praying night and day exceedingly that he might see their face. That is not a serene sentence. That is a man missing people. And he told another one that though he was absent in the flesh, he was with them in the spirit, joying and beholding their order.

You are not running the makeshift version of anything. Scripture says the presence of Christ is where two or three are gathered together in His name, and Matthew 18:20 puts the gathering in the Name rather than in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the gathering across whatever distance He finds. A postcode has never been a condition. It was never in the sentence.

And notice what God did with all that separation. He did not merely tolerate it. He made a canon out of it. Letters written because a man could not get to people are now the thing the whole church reads out loud, in every country, forever. The distance was not the obstacle to the ministry. The distance was the medium of it.

You have been holding something real, and its realness does not depend on a floor plan. The written word says where two or three come together in His name He is in the middle of them, and Matthew 18:20 gives no measurement in meters, and the Holy Spirit has been in that kitchen and in that other kitchen at the same time, which is a thing He is uniquely able to do. He does not have to choose an end of the line.

The Stone They Set Up Because They Were Parting

There is a blessing in Genesis that was invented for exactly your situation, and most people have only ever seen it on a piece of jewelry.

Two men who had been through years of tangled dealings together are about to separate. They pile up stones, they eat a meal beside the heap, and they name the place. And one of them says this:

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

Now be honest about that scene, because sentiment will ruin it. Those two men did not trust each other. The heap was a boundary marker as much as a blessing, and both of them knew it. It was not a tidy family and it was not a tender parting.

Which is precisely why the sentence is worth having. God let a blessing for separated people be spoken over a relationship that was not the picture anybody would have chosen, and then He kept it in the book. The man who set that stone up carried the name I carry, four languages back, and he was not a smooth man either.

You were given a covenant that assumes absence rather than apologizing for it. Genesis 31:49 asks the Lord to keep watch precisely in the space between two people who cannot see each other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who occupies that space now, on both sides of it at once. That gap is not empty. It has never been empty.

And I am not going to hand you either of the two things people usually say about a split household. I am not going to tell you God arranged this to teach you something, because I do not know that and neither do they. And I am not going to let anybody call it a failure, because families move for work and for papers and for care and for safety and for a hundred reasons that are nobody's business, and the reason was never the point.

You have a household, and it is the one that exists, not the one on the leaflet. Scripture says as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord, and Joshua 24:15 was said by a man whose house had been on the move for most of its life, and the Holy Spirit deals with the actual address list and not an imagined one. Your house is real. It is simply larger than one building.