Charge Given Over You

It is the empty doorway that gets her, not the room.

The room she has been fine about. She stripped the bed and hoovered and put a plant in it and told everybody she was going to make it a study, and she has not made it a study, but she has not cried in there either.

It is the doorway of the kitchen at about ten past eleven at night. That is when he used to come through it. Bang the door, drop a bag, open the fridge with his whole body, tell her three things about his day in the wrong order, and go up.

Four hours away now. A city she has visited twice. A flat she has seen on a screen with a kitchen she does not like.

And she has become a woman who checks a little blue dot.

She would not have believed it of herself a year ago. But the app is on her phone, and at about ten past eleven she looks, and the dot is at the flat or the dot is not at the flat, and if it is not she does not sleep well, and if it is she still checks again at seven.

She said to her sister, and she was half joking: I do not think anybody is watching him.

And her sister said something kind and useless, and the sentence went back inside her and stayed there.

A charge was given, and the word means an assignment

For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways (Psalm 91:11).

Charge is not a warm word. It is an administrative one. To give somebody charge over a thing is to assign it to them as their responsibility, the way a duty is handed over on a shift, and the psalm says God does that concerning a person.

And notice the reach of it: in all thy ways. Not in the dangerous places. Not when he remembers to pray. In all his ways, which includes a flat four hours away with a kitchen you do not like and a Tuesday you will never hear about.

You are not the only one who has ever been assigned to him. Scripture says a charge is given, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient sentence about assignment and makes it real to a woman looking at a blue dot at ten past eleven.

You are not being replaced. You are being relieved.

I want to say this carefully, because a mother hears any talk of handing over as a talk about being unnecessary, and that is not what this is.

You were not doing something optional for twenty-two years. You were doing a real work and it was the work God gave you and He is not embarrassed by how thoroughly you did it. The watching was right when he was in the house.

What has changed is not your love and not your value. It is the geography. He has moved beyond the reach of your eyes, and a woman cannot keep watch on a doorway that is four hours away, and the grief of that is real and I am not going to talk you out of it.

But the watch itself has not ended. It has been handed to somebody whose eyes reach further.

You have been relieved of a post and not removed from a life. The word says the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth (2 Chronicles 16:9), which is a picture of a watch with no blind side, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a comfort to a mother instead of a platitude.

What the psalm promises and what it does not

Now let me be honest, because you are a practical woman and a false promise would not survive one bad phone call.

Psalm 91 is not a guarantee that nothing happens to your son. People have used it that way and it has broken faith in a lot of families. The psalm is a declaration about who God is toward a person and where a person's dwelling is, and it does not undertake to keep any young man out of every hospital and every hard year.

What is guaranteed is the keeper, not the itinerary.

You have a son inside a charge, and the charge does not lapse on the nights you do not check. Scripture puts the promise on God's assignment rather than on the outcome, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a mother rest inside a promise that honest, which is harder than resting inside a cheerful one and lasts a great deal longer.

And I will say this too, because families need it said: you may still ring him. Nothing here says love less or watch less. It says the ten past eleven is covered by somebody who was on before you were and will be on after.