What He Will Not Hand Down

She asked him on the sand, with her chin on his knee.

She wanted to know what it will be like when He comes. She asked it the same way she asks him what the deep water is like out past the reef, which is to say she asked it as a straightforward question to the one person in her life who would know.

He has been out past the reef. He can tell her about that one.

And he heard himself say, well, nobody really knows, baby.

Then he passed her a piece of fruit and asked her about school.

Here is what makes that hard to sit with. His own grandfather told him about this on this same stretch of sand, seventy years ago, and the old man leaned right in and his eyes went bright, and he did not say nobody really knows. He said a great deal, with his hands going wide, and the boy went to bed that night with his whole chest full.

He has his grandfather's eyes. Everybody says so. He looked in the mirror the next morning and thought, and I have decided not to use them.

That is what it is. It is a decision, and it was made deliberately, and he knows the day he made it.

There was a season he spoke about all of this with a great deal of confidence in front of a great many people, and he attached something to it that he should not have attached, and the season went by, and it cost him. Not friends. Nothing so clean as friends. It cost him a certain way of being looked at, and he has never got it back, and he does not expect to.

And somewhere in the middle of that he decided, in the way a man decides these things without ever saying them out loud, that the children were not going to get this from him.

He would give them the fishing and the songs and the whole coast. Not this. This has a bruise on it now and a bruise is not an inheritance.

If you have decided not to hand something down, come and sit on the mat. There is plenty.

What the promise was actually given for

There is a passage about the return that most people read for the description. Read it for the last line instead, because the last line tells you what the whole thing is for.

For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.1 Thessalonians 4:16, 18

That last sentence is the instruction. Everything before it is the material.

It was not given so a person could work out a schedule. It was given to a church that was grieving, so they would have something to say to each other, and the word for what they were to do with it is comfort.

You are holding a promise that was handed to the church as a comfort rather than as a calculation. 1 Thessalonians 4:18 says comfort one another with these words, and it is written as a command to ordinary people speaking to each other rather than to teachers making announcements, and the Spirit who is called the Comforter is the one who carries it, which means what is in your mouth on that sand is a comfort and it was never a forecast.

Two things got welded together, and only one of them broke

Let us be precise about what happened in that season, because precision is what gives an old man his voice back.

There was He is coming. And there was the thing you attached to it.

Only one of those was ever yours to hold, and the disciples asked for the other one straight out and were told plainly it was not theirs either.

You have a promise that came through that season without a scratch and an attachment that was never issued to you. Scripture keeps the times and the seasons in the Father's own power in Acts 1:7, and it is His Spirit who stirs a man to speak about the day without ever handing him a date to hang it on, so the part that failed was the attachment, and the promise never went anywhere.

What you did afterward was put the whole thing down instead of putting down the part that broke. That is not a character flaw. It is what a person does when their hands are burnt. And it is more than was asked of you.

What the silence is teaching her

Now the child on the sand, because that is the real weight in this and everything else has been standing in front of it.

She did not learn from your answer that nobody knows. She learned that this is a subject her grandfather goes quiet on.

You were made the one she asks, and being the one she asks is a station God gave you rather than a role you auditioned for. Psalm 78:4 says we will not hide them from their children, showing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and it is written of a people who had a very mixed history to report, and the same Spirit who brings a thing to remembrance is at work in a child long after the sand is brushed off her legs.

She is not asking for a date. Nobody her age has ever asked for a date. She asked what it will be like, which is a question about joy, and you happen to know the answer to it.