The Question You Stopped Asking

It used to be a traffic lights question.

That was the trick of it, and she never planned the trick, she just noticed that the car worked better than the kitchen. Side by side, both facing forward, nobody having to hold eye contact, engine running, four minutes to the roundabout. She would ask it lightly, in among everything else, and get something back.

The answers got shorter over about a year. She could chart it if she wanted to and she has never let herself. There was a stretch of proper answers. Then answers. Then a yeah. Then a shrug that was not rude, just closed, the way a door is not rude.

And then one evening she was driving them home in the dark, and the lights went red at the same junction, and she heard herself not ask it.

That is the part nobody warns you about. Not a row. Not a slammed door. A woman at a red light listening to herself decide, in about a second and a half, that she was not going to say it, and driving on.

Everything else is good. That has to be said, and said properly, because it is true and it is the whole difficulty. They talk about nearly everything. There is a long running joke about a man at her work who microwaves fish, which has been going for two years and shows no sign of ending. There is a program they watch together and both pretend not to be invested in. There are lifts to places and the conversation on the way there. There is the way a nearly grown person still comes and sits on the arm of the sofa when she is folding the washing, for no reason, and stays a bit.

It is a warm house. It is not a picture and it never was, and the picture was never the point.

There is just one subject that has quietly gone out of the room. It went so gradually that there was never a day to notice it going. And now it is ten past eleven at night, and the kettle is on, and the house is asleep, and she is standing there with a mug she does not want, thinking about a question she has not asked for eleven months.

She would say, if anybody asked her, that she is fine. And she would mostly mean it. It is only in the kitchen, at this hour, that a much older sentence comes up and sits down with her: what if the silence means what I am afraid it means.

The subject that left the room

Let us be very careful here, because there is a thing that gets said to parents in this position and it is nearly always wrong.

She did not stop asking because she got scared or lazy or lost her nerve. She stopped because the asking had started to cost something between them, and when it came to it she chose the relationship. That is not a failure of courage. In most cases that is love making a difficult call quickly in a car, and love making difficult calls quickly is the actual job.

So the first thing to set down is the audit. She has been running it for eleven months, mostly between eleven and midnight: which conversation, which year, whether she pushed too hard at fourteen or not hard enough at twelve, whether there was a Sunday morning she should have handled differently, whether the whole thing traces back to something she said.

You are not the reason for a silence you did not create, and God has never once handed you the accounts of another person's inner life. Deuteronomy 29:29 draws the line where He drew it, the secret things belonging to Him, and the Spirit who searches the deep things of God is doing the searching precisely because it was never given to you to do.

Read that verse in full, because the second half is as important as the first.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children.Deuteronomy 29:29

Two columns. His, and yours. And nearly all the pain in that kitchen at ten past eleven comes from a woman doing her level best to work in a column that has His name on it.

You are carrying a love that made a hard call quickly in a moving car, and God has never called that cowardice. 1 Corinthians 13:7 says charity beareth all things, and beareth is a word about weight rather than about winning an argument, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a verse people mostly hear at weddings and hands it to a woman at a red light.

She does not know what is going on inside her child. That is not a gap in her parenting. It is a boundary written into the way people are made, and it applies to every household on the street, including the ones that look sorted.

What is not yours to see

Now the hardest sentence in this piece, and I want to say it gently and completely.

A silence is a silence. It is not a report. It cannot tell you what has been settled, unsettled, half believed, wondered about at two in the morning, or quietly kept. Silence is the one substance in the world that holds absolutely anything, which is exactly why the mind pours the worst thing into it at that hour of the night.

You have been reading a verdict off a page that has nothing written on it, and Scripture never asked you to. 1 Samuel 16:7 says man looketh on the outward appearance but the Lord looketh on the heart, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a relief rather than a rebuke, because it means the reading has always been His to do and never yours.

And here is the other thing to lift off you. Somewhere in this you have started treating your own walk as being on hold until the situation resolves. Your prayer life has become almost entirely about one subject, and that subject has no news in it, so the whole thing has gone quiet at both ends.

Look at the father in Mark 9. He brings his son. He does not pretend to have anything he does not have. And what he says out loud, in front of everybody, is not a report on the boy at all. It is Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

He spoke about his own state, honestly, to Jesus, in the presence of his child, and Jesus did not correct him for it.

You are free to bring what you actually have, and the bringing has always been the whole requirement. Scripture records that father's ragged sentence and preserved it rather than tidying it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who helps our infirmities when we know not what we should pray for as we ought.

Nothing on this page promises you an outcome. I will not do that to you. I do not know what will happen in your house and neither does anybody else who writes about this, and a promise nobody can keep is a cruelty dressed as encouragement. What I can tell you is what is settled: the column marked His is not empty, and He is not silent in it.