I Have Not Told Anyone I Want To Come Home

Six times. That is the number as of Tuesday.

Typed out, looked at, and deleted. Sometimes a whole paragraph. Twice it was three words. Once you got as far as it sitting in the box for about four minutes before you took it out again word by word.

And then you sent something else instead, something about the week, and got a nice reply, and put the phone down.

They know something. Not what. But your calls have been slightly too cheerful for about a month, and there is a particular quality to a person who is performing being fine that comes through a phone with remarkable clarity, and your mother has heard it and has not said anything because she does not want to push.

So there are two people being careful with each other four hundred miles apart, and neither of them has said one true sentence since about the third week.

Here is what I want to say before anything else. The deleting is not weakness. Every one of those six times, something in you got as far as writing the true thing, which means the true thing is right there and available, and the only thing standing between it and the person who loves you is a send button.

By the rivers of Babylon

There is a psalm that opens with a group of people sitting down and crying about where they are not.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. (Psalm 137:1, King James Version)

Read what is in that sentence and what is not.

There is a location. There is a sitting down. There is weeping, stated flatly, with no explanation and no apology. And there is a reason, which is remembering somewhere else.

What is not in it is any comment on whether they should have been feeling that. Nobody in the psalm tells them to be grateful for the rivers. Nobody points out that Babylon had advantages. The homesickness is simply recorded, in Scripture, as a thing that happened to people.

You are feeling something that Scripture wrote down without one word of correction, and missing a place has never once been a fault in the person doing the missing. Psalm 137:1 records the sitting and the weeping plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a room with somebody who has deleted it six times.

And notice the word we.

They were not doing it alone. It is a group of people, sitting down together, in the same feeling, and the psalm records it as a shared act rather than as a private collapse.

Which means the version where a person sits with this by themselves for a month, hiding it from everybody, is not the version in the book.

You have something that was never designed to be carried alone, and a month of holding it privately has never once been what that psalm describes. The written word puts the weeping in the plural and keeps them together in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends a private version of a thing that was meant to be shared.

What the six deletions are actually about

Now let me name the thing that stops the send, because it is not embarrassment.

It is that you cannot control what happens next.

If you send it, something starts. Your mother will react. There may be a phone call. There may be a suggestion. Somebody may want to drive up. And underneath all of that is the real fear, which is that the moment you say it out loud, other people begin making decisions about your life, and the whole thing gets taken out of your hands.

So the message gets deleted, not because the feeling is shameful, but because sending it feels like handing over the steering.

You are able to say a true thing without handing anybody the steering, and one honest sentence has never once been the same as asking somebody else to decide. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates telling somebody from being managed by them, and Psalm 137:1 records the feeling and never once records anybody being moved anywhere because of it.

And here is what the month has cost, which is worth knowing before another one goes by. The performance is more exhausting than the homesickness.

That is genuinely true and almost nobody says it. The thing that is wearing you out is not missing home. It is the twice weekly production of a version of yourself who is fine, with the right amount of detail in it, delivered convincingly, followed by an hour afterward of feeling further away than before you rang.

The homesickness costs something. The performing costs considerably more.

Wanting home is not a verdict on anybody.

You are paying twice for one feeling, and the version of yourself that gets produced on a phone call has never once cost less than the truth would have. Psalm 137:1 keeps the account plain and adds nothing to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who ends a performance that has been running since the third week.

Send it, and leave off the softener

So here is the thing to do, and the second half is the entire instruction.

Send the true version to one person at home today, in one sentence. And leave off the words but I am fine.

One sentence. Not the paragraph you wrote on Tuesday. I am finding this harder than I have been saying.

You are able to send one true sentence today, and a message that has been deleted six times has never once got easier to send by waiting for a seventh. It is written in Psalm 137:1 that they sat down and wept and that it went into the book exactly as it was, and the Holy Spirit is the one in the room while a thumb is over the send button.

And do not add the softener. This is the part that will happen automatically if it is not guarded against.

Everything in you will want to finish with: but I am fine. Or: it is probably just a phase. Or: do not worry about me. Every one of those instructs the person receiving it to do nothing, and then they do nothing, and nothing has moved except that the sentence has now been spent.

Send it and let it be uncomfortable. Let them respond however they respond.

And say the whole of it. If what is in you is heavier than homesickness, if it is the kind of weight that has started to make you think about not being here, do not wait for it to lift and do not put it in a message. Tell somebody where you are, today, out loud, in person if you can, and if it is urgent go to an emergency room or ring an emergency number where you are. That is not a dramatic act and it is not a failure of anything. It is the same instruction as this one, said louder.

You are able to say the true weight of it out loud, and reaching for help has never once been the same thing as losing control of your own life. Scripture puts the weeping in the record without comment and without a plan attached, and the same Spirit who kept it plain is with you when the message goes.