The House Is Not Something To Get Through

He noticed the shape of it on a Tuesday because his son asked him a question and he heard his own answer.

The boy asked what he was doing after. Just that. Ordinary question, six years old, on his way through.

And what he had actually been doing was calculating. He had about forty minutes of it left. The bath, the reading, the coming back down three times, and then, on the far side of that, an hour where the house would be quiet and he could finally sit down.

And he heard himself say the word after, and it landed on him strangely, because he uses that word constantly and always about the same thing.

He gets through the evening. He gets through the weekend, especially Saturday. He gets through the school holidays, and he has been getting through the school holidays for nine years, and his eldest is twelve.

And on the far side of all the getting through there is a category called afterwards, in which he will be with God properly, and which he has been aiming at every evening since the first child arrived.

If your life has an afterwards in it like that, come and sit down. Nothing here is on the other side of anything.

He asked for company and the answer had no afterwards in it

Here is one of the most personal exchanges in the Old Testament, and it turns on a single word.

Moses has been arguing with God, at length, about who will come with them. He has been offered an angel and he does not want an angel. And in the middle of it, God says this.

And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.Exodus 33:14

My presence shall go with thee.

Now read what that is not. It is not: I will meet you at the far end. It is not: get them through the wilderness and I will be waiting on the other side. It is not an appointment at a destination.

It is a description of an accompaniment. The presence goes with, in motion, through the thing itself, and the whole point of the sentence is that it is not located anywhere except beside the person.

And notice what is attached to it: and I will give thee rest. Not: and then I will give you rest. The rest is offered in the same breath as the going, to a man about to lead an enormous number of difficult people across a desert with no end date on it.

That is a man in exactly his situation being told there is no afterwards, and being told it as good news.

You have His presence going with you through the thing rather than waiting at the end of it, and it was already the arrangement. Exodus 33:14 is where that sits, in an answer given to a man who asked for company on a hard road, and the same Spirit who moved somebody to record that exchange is the one who reaches a father calculating on a landing.

There is no afterwards, and that is the relief

Now let me say the hard part and then the good part, because they are the same sentence.

The afterwards does not exist. Not the way he has it. The hour after the children go down gets eaten most nights by things he did not plan, and the ones it does not get eaten by he mostly spends recovering rather than praying, and this has been the pattern for nine years and there is no evidence it is about to change.

That sounds like bad news and it is the opposite, because what it means is that he has been aiming at a thing that has never once arrived, and he can stop aiming at it tonight.

The forty minutes are not the obstacle. The bath and the reading and the coming back down three times are the road, and the road is where the accompaniment happens, and there is no other road on offer.

And here is the part he will feel most: his son is twelve on the eldest and six on this one, and the getting through has been going on for nine years, and the boy asked what he was doing after while standing directly in the middle of what he was actually doing.

You are already accompanied in the middle of the evening, and it is already where He is. He promised it, in the last words of Matthew, where He says He is with us always, which is a sentence about duration rather than about destination (Matthew 28:20), and His Spirit does not wait upstairs for a house to go quiet.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing in this article asks anything of your children or your wife. Nobody has to be told, nothing has to be changed, and no bedtime should get longer because of anything on this page. A practice that costs the household is the wrong practice, every time.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of how full your evenings are. Scripture settled that where God receives according to what a person actually has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's free hour.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.