I Watch Them Grow Up Through Glass

Verna knows what her granddaughter's laugh sounds like through a speaker and she has not heard it in a room in two years and four months.

She is not complaining about her son. She wants that written down first because she knows how this sounds. He rings. He is good about it. They moved for work and it was the right thing and she told them so and she meant it.

And there is a folder on her phone with somewhere over four hundred pictures in it and she has looked at every one of them more than once.

Here is what she has never said out loud to anybody.

Some evenings she gets to about nine o'clock and she has been on that phone for an hour and a half, going back through it. The Halloween one. The one where the little one has flour on her face. The video of the boy singing that she has watched, she would guess, forty times.

And she gets up from that chair emptier than she sat down in it.

That is the thing she cannot explain. It is not that the pictures are bad. It is that she goes looking for them because she misses those children, and looking at them does something that feels like being fed and turns out not to be, and she stands up at nine feeling further away than she did at half past seven.

I see them every day and I have not held that child in two years, and looking at her is starting to hurt more than not looking.

And here is where I quit talking about Verna, because you have got your own folder, and you have been going back through it at night, and you have started to notice that it takes something out of you.

Let me say the first thing plain, the way a neighbor would, because you are about to be told this is your own fault for being on a phone and it is not. What you are doing is not a bad habit. It is love with nowhere to land, going back to the only place it can reach, over and over, and coming home hungry.

He wanted the same thing you want

Let me set the true thing down first, because you have been half ashamed of this and you should not be.

You are not being greedy and you are not failing to be grateful for what you have. What you want is a real thing that God made people to need, and there is an apostle in Scripture who wanted it so plainly that he stopped writing in order to say so: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

Having many things to write to you, I would not write with paper and ink: but I trust to come to you, and speak face to face, that our joy may be full.2 John 12

Look at what that verse actually is. It is a man with the best communication technology of his day, who is good at it, whose letters are still being read two thousand years later, saying: this is not the same and I am not going to pretend it is.

That our joy may be full. He does not say the letters are worthless. He says something is not filled up by them, and the filling requires a room.

So the emptiness you get up with at nine o'clock is not a fault in you, it is an accurate reading, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own sympathy, and God's Spirit is not scolding an old woman for missing a child.

The folder is a letter, and it is not a face

Now let me be honest with you the way somebody ought to be, because there is a real thing happening and it is not that phones are wicked.

The pictures are letters. They are good and they are not nothing, and a woman who says otherwise is being ungrateful about a genuine gift. Four hundred pictures is four hundred more than your own grandmother had.

But they are being asked to do a job they cannot do, and that is what makes them cost you something at nine at night. A picture answers a question about what a child looks like. It cannot answer the question you are actually asking, which is am I still theirs, and so you go back to it again, and it fails again, quietly, forty times.

That is why you get up emptier. Not because looking is wrong. Because the wrong thing is being asked to fill it.

Hear this: your attention belongs to you, and the ache under it is honest and God made you for the thing you are missing rather than for the substitute. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can act on tonight rather than something you resign yourself to.

And the plain half, the way a neighbor should say it. If the evenings have got heavy, tell somebody, and none of it is weak faith. A doctor is worth telling if the loneliness has turned into something that sits on you in the mornings too, because that has a name and it responds to help. Ring your son and ask for a standing call, a real one, at a fixed hour, where you talk and nobody is performing. Ask the children questions and let there be silences. And if a visit is possible, name a month out loud, because a month said out loud is a different thing entirely from a hope.