The Orphan Fear

Last Friday, a fifteen-year-old girl disappeared.

She belongs to a Spanish-speaking family in our diocese. She was there, and then she wasn't. And somewhere right now, a mother is sitting by a phone that isn't ringing, praying to a God who isn't answering — at least not in any way she can hear.

I keep thinking about that mother.

Jesus says, in John's gospel, I will not leave you orphaned. The disciples aren't orphans. They have families, communities, lives. But Jesus uses that word anyway — because he's naming a specific fear, not a circumstance. Not just loss. The specific fear of being left.

That mother knows it now.

And if we're honest, most of us know some version of it too. The prayer that went up and seemed to go nowhere. The long season when God felt less like a presence and more like a rumor. The orphan fear doesn't require a missing child to find us.

Paul tells the Athenians that God is not far from any of us — that in God we live and move and have our being. But he's not offering comfort. He's making a theological claim: God is not an idea we reach toward. God is the ground we already stand on, whether we know it or not. That's the hard part. Not whether God is present. Whether we can trust it when we feel nothing.

The Psalmist doesn't pretend the hard places weren't hard. You laid burdens on our backs. We went through fire and water. And then — not instead of that, but after it — you brought us to a place of refreshment. The promise doesn't erase the fire. It just refuses to let the fire be the end.

Jesus promises the Advocate — the Spirit who will be in us, not merely alongside us. This is not a presence we earn or sustain by our own effort. It is already there — in the places we haven't looked, in the grief we haven't named.

I don't know what that means for a mother waiting by a silent phone.

I'm not sure I know what it means for me on my worst days either.

But I keep returning to the word Jesus chose. Orphaned. He didn't say lost or struggling or far from God. He named the fear exactly — and then he spoke directly into it. I will not leave you that way.

Whether that promise is being kept right now, in a grief I cannot reach or fix — I hold that as an act of faith, not certainty. Some weeks, that's all I have.

Pray for the girl. Pray for her family. And if you're carrying your own version of the orphan fear this week, know that you are not alone in it.