Firm With Him, And Nothing Else

He is a good father and his son would say so, and that is not in question anywhere in this.

He turns up. He has never missed a match, including the ones in the rain four hours away. He taught the boy to swim properly and to drive and to hold a hammer. He is fair, and he is consistent, and if he says a thing will happen it happens.

His son is seventeen.

Here is what he cannot do, and he has known it for years and has never had anywhere to put it.

He does not have a soft move. Not one. When the boy is struggling, he can be steady, and he can be practical, and he can say the right true firm thing, and he does, and it helps.

But when what is wanted is the other thing, and there have been three or four occasions in seventeen years when that was plainly what was wanted, he has nothing. His body does not know the motion. He stands slightly too far away and says something correct and then makes tea.

He is forty nine.

And the reason is not a mystery to him and it does not require any digging. Nobody ever did it for him. That is the whole explanation and he has never once said it out loud to a living soul, and he is not saying it now as a complaint.

His own father was steady. Turned up. Fair. Never missed anything. And there was no soft move in that house either, and it did not occur to anybody that there was a gap, and there was no unkindness anywhere in it.

In February, when something bad happened at that school and the boy came home and sat on the end of his bed with his coat still on, he stood in the doorway for about eleven seconds.

Then he went and made tea.

You know the doorway. Yours may involve a daughter or a brother or a friend. But you know what it is to have one setting that works and to arrive at the hour when a different one is wanted, and to find nothing there, because nothing was ever put there.

You do not have to have been given it first

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because there is a version of this article that goes after your father and I am not writing it.

You are not limited to passing on what was handed to you, and you were made by a God who holds the half nobody gave you. Deuteronomy 32:18 puts both halves in one line as His own, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies a man with a move that was never modeled for him.

He is not on trial here. He turned up for seventeen years the way you turn up for seventeen years, and whatever else is true of him, that is a real inheritance and you are living off it. Nothing in this asks you to say a word against him and there would be no use in it if it did.

The pit is arithmetic, and it is this: you have concluded, below words, that a man can only give what he was given, and that therefore the soft move is not available to you, and that the eleven seconds in the doorway in February was simply what you are.

Here is the verse. It is out of a song Moses sang at the end of his life.

Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.Deuteronomy 32:18

Two halves in one line, and one God in both.

The Rock that begat thee. A father's word, and a strong one. That is the half you have. That is the half you were given and the half you have been handing on for seventeen years, and it is not nothing.

And the second half, in the Hebrew, is the word for a woman bringing a child to birth, which is why a good many translations render it as the God who gave you birth.

Now here is the thing for a man in a doorway.

Both of those are in God. Not in your father. Not in your family. Not in the inheritance you happened to receive, which was half of it and which nobody in that house knew was half.

Which means the soft move is not something you missed out on and can therefore never have. It is in God, at full strength, and it comes from Him and not from a line you were born into.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the two never travel apart. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Deuteronomy 32:18 does not make God half a father and half a mother, and it does not give Him a softer side to go with the strong one. It uses two pictures, both chosen by Him, for one God whom neither exhausts. He is never addressed by any title Scripture does not give Him, and the pictures stay in the form He gave them.

You are not disqualified by what nobody ever did for you, and you have a supply that does not run back through your own childhood. Deuteronomy 32:18 names both halves as God's own, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts into a man what was never put into him.

Take that in the doorway, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written. The half you were never given is in God and it is available to a man who did not inherit it. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts a motion into a body that never learned one, which no amount of wanting to has managed in seventeen years.