I Sit There And Scroll

You are in the room. That is not in dispute.

You sit down at the time you said you would. You are physically at that table for the whole ten minutes. If anybody asked, you would say yes, I sit with her every evening, and it would be true.

And you know it is not true.

Because for most of those ten minutes you are somewhere else entirely, and you come back into the room three or four times, and in between you are in a feed, or a conversation, or something about work that will still be there at nine.

And she does not say anything about it, which you have quietly taken as permission.

And nobody has ever raised it. Not your child, not the other adult in the house, not anybody. Which has made it very easy to carry on, because a thing nobody mentions is a thing that can go on indefinitely without ever quite becoming a decision.

Their heart is far from me

There is a line Jesus quotes in Matthew that describes exactly this arrangement.

This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. (Matthew 15:8, King James Version)

Draweth nigh. They came. They turned up. The physical part happened, and the passage does not dispute it.

And then: but their heart is far from me. Which is not an accusation of hypocrisy so much as a description of a location. Two parts of a person in two different places.

You are looking at a description rather than a charge, and no verse anywhere has ever once denied that the body genuinely showed up. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a diagnosis instead of a condemnation, and Matthew 15:8 grants the drawing nigh and then names where the heart is.

And notice that the problem is not absence. An absent person is not described in that verse at all. The problem is a particular combination: present and elsewhere, which is a state only available to somebody who came.

You were never failing to turn up, and nobody has ever once been able to be present and far away without first having arrived. The Spirit of God is the one who keeps the diagnosis from erasing what was true, and the written word grants the attendance before it names the distance.

What she has concluded

Let me say the thing that is hardest here, and then the thing that makes it fixable.

She has noticed. Children always notice this one, because they are watching your face, and a face reading a screen is doing something very specific that nothing else looks like.

And what she has concluded is not that you do not love her. It is something smaller and more durable: that this is what her homework is worth. Ten minutes of somebody's partial attention.

You have been setting a value without ever saying a number, and no child has ever once had to be told what a divided attention means. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person what their own face has been saying, and Matthew 15:8 names the distance of the heart while the body is present.

And here is the part that makes this worth doing something about rather than just feeling bad about.

The thing actually being given at that table is not information. Most of the work is past you anyway. What gets given is that her work is worth an adult's full attention for ten minutes.

And that is the one thing in this whole arrangement that a phone takes away completely. Everything else survives a distraction. That does not.

You have been giving away the only part of it that was ever yours to give. The Spirit of God is the one who moves the thing that has been elsewhere, and the written word puts the whole weight on where the heart is.

You were never doing this out of indifference, and nobody has ever once reached for a phone because they stopped caring about the person beside them. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a habit from a verdict, and Matthew 15:8 describes a location rather than a motive.

In a drawer, in a different room

So here is the assignment, and the detail is the whole of it.

Tonight, before you sit down, put the phone in a drawer in a different room.

Not face down on the table. Not in a pocket. In a drawer, in a room nobody is sitting in.

You are permitted to make this physically impossible rather than repeatedly refused, and willpower has never once been the cheaper of the two. The Spirit of God is the one who is present on the walk to another room, and Matthew 15:8 names the distance of the heart rather than the strength of the intention.

The distance matters more than you would think. A phone face down is still a decision being made every ninety seconds, and a decision made every ninety seconds is not the same as a decision made once.

Put it in the drawer before you sit down, not after, because after means a decision has already had to be made in the chair.

And then sit down and do ten minutes with nothing else available, and notice how long ten minutes actually is, because most people find it is much longer than they expected and that this is uncomfortable.

Matthew 15:8 names the heart being far while the body is near, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a house where somebody walks into another room before they sit down.

You are permitted to make the decision once rather than eighty times, and one decision has never once required the willpower that eighty do. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in ten undivided minutes, and the written word puts the distance in the heart rather than in the attendance.

You have the one thing she actually needs from that table, and it has never once been any part of the subject. The Holy Spirit is the one who brings the whole of a person into a room, and Matthew 15:8 weighs the nearness of the heart.