The Man He Called His Father In The Faith

He used the word without any embarrassment for eleven years.

That is worth noting because he is not a sentimental man and it is not a word his own family uses easily. But it was accurate. That man taught him, corrected him twice in ways that changed his life, sat with him through a genuinely bad year, and did about four hundred small things that nobody counted.

He would say it in company. My father in the faith. And people would nod because they knew what he meant.

It came apart three years ago.

Not a scandal in the loud sense. Something quieter and in some ways harder to hold, a long unravelling that revealed things going back years and that could not be reinterpreted charitably by anybody who looked at it honestly, and there were people close to it who were badly let down.

He has not used the word since.

Not about that man, which he understands. But not about anybody, and that is the part he did not decide.

There is a man now, about seventy, who has been steadily kind to him for two years, and who has the same quality of attention, and who would probably be pleased to be described that way and would certainly never ask.

And he cannot say it. He has got close twice. Both times something in his chest went flat and he said something else, something like a good friend, which is true and is not the word.

And there is a sentence underneath that he has said out loud exactly once, to nobody, driving. It is: I am too old to be somebody's son again.

Which is not a conclusion he reached by thinking. It is a conclusion that arrived and was accepted without a hearing.

And you have a word you have stopped using. About somebody, or about yourself, and you did not decide it, and you have quietly begun to describe the wanting of it as something you have outgrown.

Forsaken by both, and taken up by One

There is a line in Psalm twenty-seven that people usually read as being about literal orphans, and it is bigger than that.

For my father and my mother have forsaken me, but the Lord will take me up.Psalm 27:10

The verb in the second half is worth sitting with. Take me up. It is the word for gathering something in, the way somebody picks up a child, or takes in a person who has nowhere.

And notice that the psalm does not soften the first half. It does not say if they forsake me, and it does not explain them or defend them or work out whose fault it was. It states the loss flatly and then says what is true anyway.

You lost something real and there is a taking up that has never once been conditional on anybody else standing. It is written that when my father and my mother have forsaken me, the Lord takes me up (Psalm 27:10), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an actual experience in a man rather than a nice sentiment about God, which is the difference between a verse and a floor.

Now the word itself, and why it has become unusable.

You did not decide to stop saying it. It went, the way a taste goes after an illness, and you have been treating its absence as a fact about you rather than as a symptom.

But look at what actually happened. The word was not damaged. The word did excellent work for eleven years and described something real for most of that time. What happened is that using it cost you enormously the last time, and a man does not go back to a thing that cost him that much without something in him objecting first.

That objection is not wisdom. It is a flinch, and flinches are honest and they are not prophetic.

You are not too old to receive something, and the flinch in your chest is not information about your capacity. Scripture says the Spirit you have received is not a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15), and it is the Holy Spirit named there who does the crying in a man, which means the wanting of a father is His work in you rather than an immaturity you should have grown out of.

And the sentence in the car.

I am too old to be somebody's son again.

It is not true and you know it is not true, and the proof is that you said it alone in a moving vehicle and have never repeated it to anybody, because you would hear how it sounded.

Nobody outgrows being a son. The oldest man in any room is somebody's son. It is not a stage; it is a permanent relation, and in the sense that matters most it is the one thing about you that is guaranteed not to change.

You are a son right now and there is no age at which that stops being your standing. It is written that see what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God, and so we are (1 John 3:1), and it is His Spirit who makes that a felt thing rather than a legal one.

And the man of seventy, because he is standing right there.

Two years of steady kindness and the same quality of attention. He has not asked for anything and he never will, which is precisely the same thing that made the first one safe to trust in the beginning.

Nobody here is telling you what to call him or when. That is between two men and a page has no business in it.

You are permitted to receive kindness from somebody without deciding in advance what it will cost you. Scripture says a friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity (Proverbs 17:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who puts steady people beside a man who has been let down, which He does more often than anybody notices.