Sent, But Not Spoken To

Rafael has not missed a month in nineteen years, and he cannot remember the last time he heard his mother laugh.

Both of those things are true and he has never put them in the same sentence. He does not think of himself as a man who is far from his family. He thinks of himself as the one who carries them, which he is, and which everybody in that family would tell you without being asked.

The money goes on the second. It has gone on the second since he was twenty-four years old, through two bad years of his own that nobody there ever heard about, and through the year he was ill, and through the month his own boiler went and he washed in cold water rather than tell them.

He is proud of that and he should be. That is not a small thing.

But the phone call happens differently now, and he could not tell you when it changed.

It used to be Sundays. Then it was most Sundays. Then it became a message, because a message is easier when the time difference is what it is and everybody is tired. And then it became a message with a photograph in it, and then it became a photograph.

And somewhere in there he stopped being a son who rings and started being an arrangement that arrives on the second.

He found this out in a queue, of all places, standing in a shop with his phone in his hand, scrolling for something else entirely. He passed the transfer. He passed it again the month before. Nineteen years of the second of the month, going back and back and back, faithful as sunrise.

And it occurred to him, standing there holding a basket, that he could not remember the sound of his mother's laugh. Not that she has stopped laughing. That he has not been there when she does.

He put the basket down on the shelf and walked out of the shop.

Now, hear me carefully, because there is a lie standing right beside this and I want it named before it gets in.

Rafael has not been buying his way out of anything. He is not a cold man and he has not been sending money instead of love. The money is love. It has been love for nineteen years, it has kept a roof on, it put his sister through school, and anybody who tries to tell him otherwise has never had to be the one who carries a family from a long way away.

That is not what has happened here.

What has happened is quieter and gentler than that. A thing that was one expression of his heart became the only expression that still had a schedule, and everything else drifted, because everything else needed him to remember and the transfer never did.

You have your own version, and it may not be a family at all. There is something in your life you are faithful to, genuinely and expensively faithful to, and the faithfulness has become the whole of the relationship, and the part that needed your voice has gone quiet without anybody deciding it should.

Nobody is calling you a cold man. Nobody in this message is going to.

The money went. That is real, and it counts. It is just that you have been sending it somewhere your feet have not been in a long time.

The Father asks for the one thing the transfer cannot carry

There is a line in the Proverbs where a father speaks and asks for the only thing that cannot be arranged in advance.

My son, give me thine heart, and let thine eyes observe my ways.Proverbs 23:26

Not give me your provision. Not keep the household standing, which that son was almost certainly already doing. Give me your heart, and let your eyes watch. He is asking for presence and attention, which are the two things no arrangement has ever been able to deliver on a schedule.

And hear this before anything else, because it is the ground the whole thing stands on. You are not being told the nineteen years were empty. That is not my reassurance, that is what the written word says about a man who provides for his own, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who makes that settle in a man standing outside a shop with his heart going.

And you are already His son. Not once you have visited, and not once the calls are regular again: the word says that anyone led by the Spirit of God is a son of God, and it is the Spirit Himself who bears witness with your spirit that this is so, which means the standing is not the thing under review here. Only a habit is.

Now hear the direction of what Jesus said about treasure, because near everybody runs it backwards. Where the treasure is, there the heart will be also. The treasure goes first, and the heart follows it and settles there.

Which cuts both ways, and Rafael's is the second way. His treasure has been going home for nineteen years. So has some part of his heart, honestly. But a transfer is a very quiet kind of arrival. It goes on the second, it says nothing, and it asks nothing of him, and a heart cannot follow a thing that never once required him to be in the room.

The thing that has a schedule wins

I am not going to tell you what to do with any amount. Not one figure, not one proportion. It is not mine to say and it never will be, and the second I said it you would be taking money advice from a message about your own soul.

But I will tell you something about schedules, because it is the whole mechanism here.

Whatever in your life has a date attached to it will keep happening long after everything without a date has quietly stopped. That is not a spiritual failure. That is how a week works. The transfer survived nineteen years because it did not need him. The Sunday call needed him, and needing him is exactly what killed it.

You are not a man who has to become more loving. God is not asking you for a new heart toward your mother; the word says He has already put His love in you by the Holy Spirit given to you, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that love warm in a man who has not been able to get home.

And nothing about those years is lost. He restores the years the locusts ate, says the written word, and the Spirit has never been slowed by a long silence between two people who love each other. Your mother is not keeping a tally. Almost nobody's mother is.