My Times Are Held in Your Hand

They came in at half past nine and the younger one went straight upstairs, which is not what she does.

The older one stood in the kitchen doorway while he was doing the dishwasher and asked, in a voice that was trying to be casual and was not, whether it was true that everything was about to end.

He said something. He is not proud of what he said. It was some combination of well, nobody knows, and you do not need to worry about that, and let us talk about it tomorrow, and all three of those are things he has said to a frightened child before about other subjects and they usually work.

They did not work. He watched them not work.

Then he went up to the younger one, who was in bed with the light on, reading nothing, and she asked whether they would be together.

He is thirty seven and he had absolutely nothing. Not because he does not believe anything. Because everything he could think of to say was either a lie, or an argument with somebody he had not heard, or a version of the same thing that had just frightened them.

The event was well meant. He knows the man who ran it and would not want him blamed for it. Something got said, or shown, and forty children went home in cars, and two of them came into his kitchen.

Sit down at the table. There is a sentence for this, and it is short enough to say to a child.

The sentence that fits in a child's hand

Here it is, and it is five words long in most translations.

My times are in your hand.Psalm 31:15

That is a whole theology of the future that a nine year old can hold. It does not say what will happen. It does not say when. It says who has it, and it uses the most concrete possible image for it, which is a hand.

And notice the psalm it comes from. David is in serious trouble, being pursued, with the situation entirely out of his control. That sentence is not written by somebody in a settled position. It is what a man says when he cannot manage his own circumstances and has to put them somewhere.

You have something to give both of them tonight. Psalm 31:15 puts every time in God's hand, and the Spirit inspired it as five words rather than as a paragraph so that it could be carried by people who cannot hold a paragraph.

What not to say, and why

Now the three things you reached for, because they failed for reasons worth knowing.

Nobody knows is true and it is not enough on its own. To a frightened child, nobody knows sounds like nobody is in charge, which is the exact opposite of the intended meaning and is a good deal more frightening.

You do not need to worry about that is heard as a refusal. Children read that as the subject being closed rather than as the subject being safe.

Let us talk about it tomorrow works for most things and does not work for this one, because a fear about everything ending does not sit quietly overnight. It gets bigger in the dark and it recruits.

None of that is a failure of fathering. Nothing written anywhere hands a man a script for that doorway, and the Spirit is not grading your first attempt at a subject nobody prepared you for.

What actually works is the sentence with a person in it. Not nobody knows. God knows, and it is in His hand, and He is good.

You have that available in five words tonight. Psalm 31:15 is short enough to say on a stairs and solid enough to hold two children, and the Spirit does not need a longer version of it than the one He inspired.

What to say to each of them

Here is the practical part, and it is two conversations rather than one.

To the older one, who asked whether it is true, say the whole thing plainly. Nobody has been told when. Not the people at that event, not anybody on the internet, not me. Jesus said the day belongs to the Father. What we do know is that God is good and He has us, and we are going to go on planning things and looking forward to things because that is what people do who believe that.

To the younger one, who asked whether you would be together, the answer is shorter. God has said that His people will be together with Him and with each other. That is what He has actually said. We are not going to be separated from Him or from each other in a way that lasts.

That is the whole answer to what she asked and it does not need decorating. She did not ask for a description of anything. She asked whether the family holds, and the answer to that has been written down, and it is worth noticing that the passage everybody reads at funerals says caught up together with them, which is a promise about people staying with people.

You are allowed to say that with confidence. It stands written and it is not an invention, and the Spirit carries a plain sentence into a child better than a careful one.

And then say the five words, out loud, and let her say them back if she wants to.