The Calls Have Got Shorter

It used to be forty minutes. He never once looked at the time during those calls, which is how he knows it was forty.

Now it is six. He knows that because he looked, last Sunday, when it ended, and then wished he had not.

Nothing is wrong. That is what makes it so difficult to say to anybody. There has been no argument and no falling out; his son is twenty six and busy and has a girlfriend and a job that takes more than it should, and there is a nine hour difference which means one of them is always calling at a bad time.

The calls are warm. They are just short.

How is work. Fine. How is your mother. She is fine. Everything all right there. Yes, all fine.

And then somebody has to go, and it is usually not him.

He left when the boy was eleven. It was the right decision and he would make it again, and the money he sent was the reason the boy finished school, and everybody in the family knows that and says it.

What nobody says, and what he thinks about at the window on Sunday evenings, is that a man cannot be at a football match from four thousand miles away. He was at none of them. He has a photograph of a team he never met.

So the six minutes have started to mean something to him, and the meaning is this: I am a duty now. He rings because he is a good son, not because he wants to.

That is you, and six minutes is not the evidence you have decided it is.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you how to make him ring for longer. Nothing here is aimed at moving a grown man's will, because that was never ours, and any page that offers you a way to produce a longer phone call from your son is offering you something it does not have.

I am not going to tell you what the six minutes mean to him. I do not know. Neither do you, and that is the actual problem, and it is worth naming as a gap rather than filling with the worst available answer.

And I am not going to relitigate your leaving. You left, it fed a family, it also cost something real, and both of those are true and neither cancels the other. Anybody who makes that simple in either direction is not being honest with you.

You are not being punished for a decision you made in good faith. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it makes no exception for a heart that is breaking about something it chose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at that window on a Sunday evening.

The psalm that covers the whole road

There is a line at the end of Psalm 121 that is worth reading as a father whose son is four thousand miles away.

The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.Psalm 121:8

Going out and coming in is an old way of saying everything: the leaving and the arriving, the whole of a life's movement. It is a phrase that covers a person's entire road, not the parts you can see.

And the preserving is God's. Not yours.

Now put that beside your situation, because it is exactly shaped for it. There is a young man on the other side of the world whose days you know almost nothing about. You do not know what his Tuesdays look like. You cannot be there.

And that is not a gap in his covering. It is a gap in your sight.

The psalm does not say the Lord preserves the parts a father can supervise. It says going out and coming in, from this time forth, which is a way of saying that nothing in that boy's week happens outside it.

You are not the one holding your son's life together. Scripture says the Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in, Psalm 121:8, and the preserving belongs to Him across a distance no father could cover, and the Holy Spirit is with a twenty six year old on a Tuesday his father will never hear about.

What six minutes probably is

Let me offer a different reading, not as a comfort but as a genuine possibility that you have not considered because you have been running only one. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 121:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Six minutes is what a twenty six year old man says to somebody he is not worried about.

Think about how you rang your own parents at that age, if you did. Short, warm, nothing much said, because the relationship was secure enough not to need maintenance. People make long calls in two situations: when something is wrong, and when something is being rebuilt.

Your son says everything is fine in six minutes because from where he is standing everything is fine, and he has not the slightest idea that the length of the call has become a message.

That may not be right. But it is at least as likely as your reading, and you have given it none of the four hundred hours you have given the other one.

You are not required to interpret silence as loss. Scripture says charity thinketh no evil... beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 1 Corinthians 13:5-7, and believeth all things is a decision about which reading to hold when you cannot know, and the Holy Spirit is not the source of the interpretation that has been running at that window.

What to do with the six minutes

Here is the practical part, and it matters more than it sounds.

Stop trying to make the call longer. He will feel it if you do, and what he will feel is pressure, and pressure is the one thing that makes a call get shorter still.

Instead, change what is in it. How is work, fine is not a conversation, it is a form. Bring one real thing each time: something that happened to you this week, something you remembered, a question about a specific thing in his life rather than a general one.

And use the other channels. A photograph sent on a Wednesday with two lines under it. A message on the day of something you know he has. Men of twenty six often say far more in writing than they will say on a call, and they say it at their own hour rather than at yours.

Do not ask for more. Give more, in smaller pieces, with nothing attached.

You are not powerless in this, and none of it requires his cooperation. Scripture says let us not love in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth, 1 John 3:18, and deed in that verse is small and concrete rather than grand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a two line message further than it has any right to go.