Three Under Six and No Quiet Anywhere

He worked out recently that he has not had ten uninterrupted minutes in his own house since the first one was born, and the first one starts school in September.

It is not a complaint. He loves them absurdly. But the arithmetic is the arithmetic: somebody is awake from six, somebody needs something roughly every ninety seconds, and the only silence in that building happens at about half ten at night when he is too tired to be a person, let alone anything more demanding than that.

He used to have a thing he did. Mug of tea, kitchen table, twenty minutes, before work. It was not elaborate. It was the best part of the day and he has not done it since about 2022.

He has tried the substitutes. Praying in the shower, which lasts four minutes and mostly turns into a list. Praying in the car, which turns into the radio. And every attempt has the same shape: he gets about forty seconds in and something needs him.

So what he has concluded, without ever saying it out loud, is that this is a season where he is out of contact. Not abandoned. Just out of range, temporarily, for about a decade.

That is your kitchen. That is your ninety seconds. And I want to speak to that, because Paul says something to a crowd of strangers about exactly how far away God is.

How far away He is

Paul is standing in Athens talking to people who have no scripture in common with him, and he chooses the plainest possible measurement.

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us: for in him we live, and move, and have our being.Acts 17:27-28

Not far from every one of us.

He is speaking to a whole square full of people, none of whom have arranged anything, and he does not put God at the end of a process. He puts Him at arm's length from each person present, individually, without any preparation being mentioned.

And then he goes further, into the strangest phrase in the passage: in him we live, and move, and have our being. Not near. Not accessible. Inside. The moving happens in Him. That includes carrying a child down a staircase at half six in the morning.

You are living and moving inside Him this morning. Not out of range, not on hold. The written word puts God nearer than any arrangement you could make, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who gets forty seconds before somebody needs him.

Now let me say something about the children, because four years of this can quietly file them under interruption.

They are not the obstacle. They are three people who wake up delighted that you exist, and the season that has taken your twenty minutes is the same season that has given you them. Nobody in that house is standing between you and God.

You are not being kept from Him by your own family. The written word never treats the people you are responsible for as the thing that blocks the way. The Holy Spirit is in that kitchen with all four of you at seven in the morning.

And now the sentence you have never said aloud: out of contact for a decade.

That belief has been quietly running your spiritual life for four years, and it rests entirely on an assumption you have never examined, which is that contact requires quiet.

You are in contact right now, in the noise. In him we live, and move, and have our being, and there is no clause in it about volume. The Holy Spirit has been present through every forty seconds you thought did not count.