I Did Not Want To Be My Father

His father said everything he thought, always, to everybody, and believed it was honesty.

It was not cruelty. That is the thing that makes it complicated and it is why it has taken him thirty years to think about it clearly. The old man was not unkind. He was warm and he was funny and half the street came to him for things.

He just said it. Whatever he saw in you, he told you, at the table, in front of your brothers, and he could not understand why anybody would want it any other way.

And the son sat at that table until he was twenty and then left, and made himself a promise on the way out that he has kept with more discipline than he has kept anything else in his life.

I will not do that to anybody.

He has not. Ask anybody who knows him. He is the one who listens. His own children have said, more than once, in the way children say things they think are compliments, that Dad never lectures.

And in April his eldest, who is twenty-six, sat in that kitchen and said something about the way his own life is going, and something came up in his father from below the ribs, immediate and specific and not angry.

And he swallowed it.

And in May, again, over something else.

And in July.

Three times now, and every time it is the same thing arriving, and every time the promise from thirty years ago rises up in front of it like a door closing on a spring.

And what he has been sitting with, standing at that stove with the pans going, is not guilt about his father.

It is a much colder question. It is: have I spent thirty years being wise, or have I just been frightened of a dead man?

And that is you at your own stove, or you would not still be reading.

The same Person stops people and sends them

Let me show you something that almost nobody preaches, because they skip it to get to the good part.

Paul is traveling. He tries to go one way and this happens:

And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.Acts 16:6

Forbidden. By the Holy Spirit. From preaching.

And then he tries again in another direction:

And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.Acts 16:7

Stopped twice.

And then, two verses later, a man appears to him in the night and says come over and help us, and he goes, immediately.

Same Person. Stopping and sending. Within about three verses.

You are dealing with Somebody who does both, and the same One who has been closing your mouth is the One who opens it. It is written that they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia (Acts 16:6). The Holy Spirit is not a voice that only ever says go, and He is not a voice that only ever says stop.

Now the promise you made at twenty, because I am not going to take it off you.

You were right at twenty, and thirty years of restraint have been a real protection of real people. It is written that a fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back (Proverbs 29:11), and holding it back is the thing you have done all your life. The Holy Spirit was in that restraint, and the people around you have been the better for it.

But notice what your promise cannot do.

It cannot distinguish. It closes on everything, at the same speed, with the same force, whether the thing arriving is your father's habit or something else entirely.

A door on a spring does not check what is coming through.

You are able to tell the difference between your father's way and something worth saying, and telling the difference is what thirty years has actually equipped you for. It is written that the Spirit of truth will guide you into all the truth (John 16:13), and guiding is a thing done with a person who is already thinking. The Holy Spirit did not spend thirty years teaching you restraint in order to leave you unable to use it.

So here is the test, and it is a good one, and it is yours rather than mine.

Your father spoke to relieve himself. That was the shape of it. Whatever he saw, out it came, because holding it was uncomfortable to him.

Ask of the thing that arrived in April: if I say this, who is it for?

If it is for you, if saying it would relieve something in you, then swallow it, and your promise is doing exactly the job you built it for.

If it is for him, and it would cost you to say, and you would rather not, that is not your father. That is the opposite of your father.