I Think We Left It Too Late

They were nine and eleven the last time this worked.

You can remember it exactly. Everybody in the car, the arguing that was almost cheerful, somebody asking are we nearly there before you had left the street. It was tiring and it was easy, both at once, and you did not know at the time that it was the easy part.

Now they are fifteen and seventeen, and the thought of suggesting a family trip makes something in your stomach turn over.

Because you can see how it goes. You say it at dinner. There is a pause. One of them says, like, all of us? and the other one does not look up. And then somebody mentions work, or a friend's thing, or nothing at all, and the subject moves on, and you sit there having learned something about your family that you did not want to learn.

So you have stopped saying it. Not as a decision. It just stopped being a thing you said.

And somewhere in the last two years you concluded that this window has closed. That family trips belong to families with younger children, that yours had its turn, and that suggesting one now would be slightly embarrassing for everybody, mostly you.

I want to go at that conclusion, because I do not think you have tested it. I think you decided it privately, on the evidence of one pause at a dinner table, and then acted on it for two years without ever checking.

The years that the locust hath eaten

There is a line in Joel about lost time, and it is worth reading with the specific grief you carry rather than in general.

The prophet is speaking to people who have watched years of harvest destroyed by insects. Not one bad season. Years. And what is said to them is not that the years did not matter.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you. (Joel 2:25, King James Version)

I am not going to stand here and promise you that your children will be nine again, or that a Saturday out repairs two years of not asking. That is not what this says and it is not mine to offer.

What the passage does is refuse to treat eaten years as final. That is God's business and it is His to do, and the only thing on our side of it is that we stop writing the account off before He has finished with it.

You are not required to write these years off, and no season of this family has ever once been beyond what God says He restores. Joel 2:25 puts the eaten years in God's hands to answer for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a mother from closing a ledger she has no business closing.

And notice something small in the verse that most people read past. He calls the locusts my great army which I sent. The lost time is not outside His knowledge. It is not a period He was absent for.

Which means the two years of you not asking are not a gap in the record. They are inside it.

You have not been outside His attention for a single one of these quiet years, and none of it has ever once happened while He was looking elsewhere. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that land as comfort rather than as accusation, and it is written in Joel that even the years the locust ate are years He speaks about by name.

A pause is not an answer

Now the practical part, and it is about what you actually have evidence for.

There is one pause at a dinner table. Maybe three. And out of that came a whole conclusion about your teenagers' entire attitude to their own family. I want to suggest a different reading of that pause, and you can weigh it yourself.

A fifteen year old at a dinner table is not answering the question you asked. They are answering four other questions at the same time, and all of them are about being seen. Is this going to be embarrassing. Will my sister be difficult. Am I being asked to want something in front of everybody. Is there a right answer here and have I already given the wrong one.

None of that is about the trip. Almost none of it is even about you.

You are able to ask a question your teenagers do not answer well, and a bad answer has never once told you what they actually wanted. It is written that God speaks about the eaten years rather than writing them off, which is why one flat response at a table is not a finding, and His Spirit is the one who gives a mother the nerve to ask a second time.

And here is the thing about this age that nobody tells you. They will not choose it in front of each other. They will come, though, if it is easy and the asking is quiet and there is no performance required from them.

Which changes the shape of the ask completely. Not an announcement to the table. One person, on their own, no audience.

You have a way in that does not need everybody to agree at once, and asking one of them alone has never once been going behind anybody's back. The Holy Spirit is the one who prompts the quieter approach in a mother's mind at the exact moment she was about to give up, and Joel 2 has years being restored in it rather than years being conceded.

Ask one, on their own

So here is the assignment.

Ask one of your teenagers a real question about going somewhere. On their own. Not at dinner.

In the car, or in the kitchen while they are getting food, or in a doorway. Somewhere sideways, where a shrug is available to them and does not cost them anything.

And ask something real. Not would you like to go on a family trip, which is a question about the whole institution of your family and nobody can answer it. Ask: if we went somewhere for one day this month, what would make it worth your time.

You are asking for information and not for enthusiasm, and that has never once made the question smaller than it looks. Joel 2:25 has God speaking to people about eaten years rather than about their attitude, and the same Spirit who moved a prophet to say it is present in a kitchen where a mother is asking without a plan behind it.

Then let them answer badly. They might say nothing. They might say something you were not hoping for, like as long as we are not out all day, or can I bring somebody. Those are not refusals. Those are terms, and terms mean somebody is negotiating rather than declining.

Write down what they say and do not argue with any of it.