Six Months of No Reply

He has read the silence about forty different ways and he has stopped believing any of them.

The first month he read it as busy. That was easy and it was probably even true for a while.

The second month he read it as a point being made, and he went back over the conversation in March about a hundred times, and he still does not know which sentence did it, and he has three candidates.

By the fourth month he was reading it as permanent, and that is the reading that took the weight out of him, because a man can hold a difficult thing for a while if it has a shape, and permanent has no shape at all, it is just weather from now on.

And in the last few weeks he has started reading it as a verdict on his whole fatherhood, going back years, which is what a mind does at that point.

Kimo is fifty-nine and he comes down to the jetty in the evenings because there is always something to mend and because sitting at home in the same room as a phone is a specific kind of torture that other people do not seem to understand.

She is twenty-eight. She is well, as far as anybody knows, and her cousin sees things sometimes and passes on that she is well, and Kimo is grateful for that and it is also unbearable, because it means the silence is not an emergency, it is a decision.

If you are reading a silence, I am not going to tell you it is a good thing. It is not. Six months of not hearing from your own child is a wound and I would not have you pretend otherwise, and any comfort that starts by minimizing it has insulted you.

But there is a question worth sitting with. What if somewhere in that quiet, somebody else is speaking?

God takes somebody somewhere quiet on purpose

The passage is one of the strangest and most tender in the prophets, and God is speaking about a people who have gone off entirely.

Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably unto her.Hosea 2:14

Read the three verbs and read the order.

I will allure her. Not drag, not compel. It is a drawing word, gentle, almost a courting word, and it is God describing His own approach to somebody who has left.

And bring her into the wilderness. Into a place with nothing in it. No noise, no company, no distractions, and in the ancient world that meant a place where you could not be reached and could not perform for anybody.

And speak comfortably unto her. Literally, speak upon her heart. That is the point of the wilderness in that verse. It is not a punishment and it is not an exile. It is a room quiet enough for something to be said.

You are looking at a quiet, and it is already the kind of place where God says He speaks, and He named the wilderness as a room and not a sentence. I am not turning a father's wound into a lesson. It is written in Hosea 2:14, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a verse about a quiet place onto a jetty in the evening.

What may not be claimed here

And now the limit, and I want to state it before he builds anything on this, because a man in month six will grab whatever is offered.

Nobody can tell Kimo that his daughter's silence is God taking her into a wilderness to speak to her. That would be a claim about the inside of a twenty-eight year old woman that no article and no preacher has any access to, and if he built on it and she stays silent for four more years, the disappointment would land on God, who did not say it.

Here is what can be said. That silence is not automatically absence. That God's stated method includes quiet places. That a room with nothing in it is not, in His hands, an empty room.

That is not a reading of his daughter. It is a fact about God, and it is enough to change what a man does with an evening.

You are not being handed a reading of her, and the fact about Him is already true, and it does not depend on what is happening in anybody's heart tonight. Scripture says He speaks upon the heart in the quiet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that in places nobody can see into.

The verdict he has started passing on himself

And here is the part that actually needs the most care, because it is the newest and it is doing the most damage.

In the last few weeks he has been reading the silence as a verdict on his fatherhood. That is the reading that will hollow him out if it stands, and it has to be answered rather than left.

There were failures. There always are; he raised her mostly alone from when she was eleven and he got things wrong and some of them were real. He is not asking to be told he was perfect and he would not believe it.

But a silence is not an assessment. It has no content. It contains no verdict, no finding, no list, and the reason it feels like all three is that a mind with nothing to work on will fill an empty space with the worst material it has.

A man cannot be judged by an absence of information, and he has been convicting himself on one for six months.

You are not under a verdict, and there is already no content in a silence, and a mind filling an empty room is not a court. It is written that the Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy (Psalm 103:8), and the Holy Spirit is the one who deals with a real failure specifically rather than leaving a man to sentence himself on nothing.