My Teenager Will Not Leave Their Room

You can remember it. That is the difficult part.

Not that long ago there was a child who came and found you. Who wanted to be taken places. Who told you things at length that nobody else had the patience for.

And there is a door now, and behind it is somebody who says no to everything, pleasantly enough, and it has been like that for long enough that you have stopped asking.

I want to say the true thing about the stopping. It was not laziness and it was not giving up. It was that asking had begun to cost more than it returned, and a person can only do that for so long before something in them protects itself.

So the door is shut, and you are not knocking, and underneath all of it is a grief you have not been given permission to name, because nobody has died and everybody is fine.

When he was yet a great way off

There is a moment in Luke that everybody knows and almost nobody reads for what the father was doing beforehand.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. (Luke 15:20, King James Version)

When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him.

Now think about what has to be true for that sentence to work. To see somebody a great way off, you have to be somewhere you can see from, at the moment they appear, without knowing they are coming.

That father was not sitting inside. He was in a position where the road was visible, and he had been in that position long enough that being there was ordinary.

You are being shown a father whose whole action was standing where he could see, and it was never a search party that brought anybody home. Luke 15:20 has the seeing happen from a distance and before anything else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as a job you can actually do.

And notice what he does not do in the whole account. He does not go looking. He does not send word. He does not appear at a far country with an argument. He waits somewhere visible, and then he runs.

You have a job that consists of being where you can be seen, and it was never fetching that a father in that story did. The written word puts everything before the running into a position rather than an action, and the Spirit of God is what makes waiting somewhere visible a thing rather than a nothing.

What is left when the asking stops

Now let me deal with the fear underneath it, because I think it is the real reason this article got opened.

The fear is that stopping the asking is the end of it. It is not, and here is why. Asking is one form of presence. It is not the only one, and it is not even the strongest one, and it happens to be the one that costs both of you the most.

What has not stopped is that somebody is here, that the house has a shape, that there is a person downstairs who would go out if anybody wanted to, and that all of this is known. The watching is the whole of the job, and a parent standing where they can be seen has not given up on anybody.

You are not out of the picture, and it was never the asking that was holding this together. Luke 15 puts the father in a position rather than on a road, which is exactly why the Spirit of God does not require a parent to keep knocking to still be there.

And there is something worth saying about the room. A door that is shut is not a wall. Somebody behind a shut door can hear a house. They can hear whether it is angry, whether it has given up, and whether anything still happens in it at six o'clock on a Thursday.

Be somewhere visible at six

So the practical part, and it is a position rather than a request.

Go out for twenty minutes at the same time every week, where the house can see you leave.

You are able to be visible without asking anybody anything, and it has never once required a knock to have been present. The passage puts the father where the road can be seen and leaves him there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody putting a coat on in a hallway at six.

Same day. Same hour. Coat on in the hall rather than by the back door. Not sneaking out, not announcing it, just doing an ordinary thing where it is visible.

And once, before you go, say it, briefly and without weight: I am going out for twenty minutes, come if you want. Then leave, and let the no stand, and do not knock again that week.

Because what a child behind a door needs to know is not that they are being pursued. It is that there is a thing that happens, reliably, that they can join at any point without a conversation about why they have not been joining it.

You are able to be a fixed point rather than a pursuit, and that has never once been the same thing as having stopped caring. Luke 15:20 has a father see a long way off because he was standing where he could, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with somebody leaving a house at six on their own.