Everything I Say to Him Is a Progress Report

There is a number in your head and you check it the way other men check the football.

Eleven hundred and four. That is where it is tonight. You do not have it written down anywhere and you would be embarrassed if anybody knew you kept it, but you could tell them the number at any hour of any day, and you have been able to since the second week.

He comes round on Tuesdays. He is twenty-six and he has his own flat now and a job at the depot, and he sits at your kitchen table and eats an enormous amount of food and tells you about a man at work called Baz who has strong views about everything.

And you say the same thing you always say, one way or another, before he leaves.

I'm proud of you, son. And then, because you cannot help it, because it is what the pride is made of: you're doing so well.

He always says thanks, Dad. And there is something in his face for a second, a very small thing, that you have never been able to name and have decided is nothing.

Tonight the door shut behind him and you stood in the kitchen with two plates and you finally named it.

Every good thing you have said to that boy in three years has been a progress report. He is not your son at that table. He is a run of days, and you are the man who checks it.

God said it before there was anything to check

Come and lean on the counter with me a minute. I am not going to make this worse than it is, and I am not going to let it be smaller than it is either.

First, the true thing, and I want it said clearly because Scripture would not have me start anywhere else and the Spirit is not in the business of shaming a father for loving badly in the only direction he could see. The counting is not a failure of love. The counting is what love does when it has been frightened for a very long time. You started counting in the second week because the alternative was lying awake with nothing to hold, and the number was something to hold. Nobody is on trial in this kitchen.

But you have worked out tonight that a number is a poor thing to hand a man, and you were right to work it out, so let me put something better in your hands.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God.1 John 3:1

Read what that verse does not contain. There is no condition in it. There is no clause about conduct, no provided that, no reference to a run. The apostle is not describing love that has been earned into position. He is standing back and staring at love that was bestowed, which is a word for something handed over, and the astonishment in behold is the astonishment of a man who knows perfectly well what the recipients were like.

Your son is spoken of by God in exactly that unconditioned way, tonight, at eleven hundred and four days and at any other number. That is not me being soft with a frightened father. That is what is written, and what the sentence says with its own grammar, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and lands it in a kitchen with two plates in the sink.

Here is what nobody tells a parent in your position. When you say something good over your son, you are not producing it and you are not maintaining it. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about him. Your mouth is a door. God is the one walking through it. Which means the blessing does not have to be underwritten by his behavior, and it will not be invalidated by it either.

You have a word to speak over that boy that does not have a number attached to it anywhere, and it does not become a lie on a bad week. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), sealed, past tense, before conduct, and the Spirit is the one who carries a settled thing out of heaven and into an ordinary father standing at a kitchen counter.

What the small thing in his face was

Now let me name the thing you saw in him and could not read, because I think you already suspect it.

When the only good word a man ever hears from his father is attached to his streak, he learns something the father never intended to teach: that the love and the number are the same object. So the praise lands, and underneath the praise a very quiet arithmetic starts running. If this is what he is proud of, then on the day the number resets, what happens to him.

He is not ungrateful. He is doing sums about the day he is most afraid of.

That is not a failure you committed. It is a side effect of loving a man through a fire while keeping score of the fire, and what is written never once required a father to be that precise. The Spirit is here to hand you the other kind of sentence, and it is not complicated.

A blessing spoken over your son tonight is not a comment on his conduct, and it does not go up or down. It is written that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:39), which is Paul deliberately listing everything he can think of and finding none of it strong enough, and the same Spirit who breathed that list is standing in this kitchen with you.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to stop caring about the days. You would not be able to and I would not ask you. What I am telling you is that the days are a thing you carry to God about him, and the blessing is a thing you say to his face, and the mistake was pouring one into the other until there was only one sentence left.

What you say over him will stand over his life whether the number holds or whether it does not. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and that is not a promise about the outcome, which is God's and not mine to hand you. It is a promise about what happens to a word of His once it has been spoken. The Spirit carries it. It does not depend on Tuesday going well.