Four Years of Calls He Does Not Take

You call him on the first Sunday of the month, at about four, which is a time you settled on for no reason you could explain to anybody.

It rings out. It has rung out for four years. His voicemail is the automated one, the woman's voice reading the number back, which means he has never set it up, which means at some point you started reading meaning into that too.

You do not leave a message any more. You did for the first year. You would say it is your dad, and then say something about the weather or the truck, and then say alright then, and hang up feeling like a man who has just talked to a machine in an empty room, because that is precisely what you were.

Now you just let it ring the full length and then put the phone face down on the table.

There was a thing said. Four years ago, in this kitchen, by you, in a temper, about his wife. You have gone over the sentence approximately nine thousand times and you have never once been able to make it come out better than it did.

He is thirty-four. He lives about two hours away, which is the part that gets you at three in the morning: not that he is far, but that he is close, and it makes no difference at all.

And what you sat down here to think about tonight, with the phone face down, is that in all this you have never once said a good thing over that boy. Not before it. Not since.

The father was looking before the road was used

Sit still. I am not going to work on that sentence you said, and I am not going to hand you a plan for getting him back. That is not what this is and you would smell it coming a mile off.

Let me get one thing out of the way first, because Scripture will not let me leave it and the Spirit will not let me be cruel about it. That boy is not on trial in this kitchen. Neither is his wife. And you are not either, whatever you have been running through your head since three o'clock this morning. There is a thing that was said and there is a distance that came after it, and I am not going to sort out the accounts tonight, because tonight is not about the accounts.

Now come and look at the most famous father in the book, and look at what he was doing before anything happened.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

Everybody preaches the running. The Spirit put the other half in first, so look at the seeing. When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him. You do not see a man a great way off by accident. You see him a great way off because you have been looking down that road, day after day, at a distance where there is nothing to see, for as long as it takes.

That father had been standing at his gate for a long time saying good things about a son who was not there to hear any of them. That is the picture Jesus chose.

You are already doing the hard half of that, and you have been doing it every first Sunday at four o'clock for four years. That is not me finding a silver lining in a phone call. It is what is written. That is what the text shows a father doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a story that old and shows a man in a kitchen that he is already standing in it.

Here is the part that changes what tonight is for. When you speak a blessing over your son, you are not reaching him and you are not working on him. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about him. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it. Which means the blessing does not need him to pick up, and it does not need him to have apologized, and it does not need you to have found the right words for the thing you said four years ago.

You can bless that boy tonight from a kitchen he will never stand in, and none of its weight depends on his phone. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, finished, before anybody was speaking to anybody, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word out of heaven, which is a great deal further than two hours.

What a blessing is not

Now let me take something off you, because I think you have had it on since about the second year and you have been calling it facing facts. What is written will take it, and the Spirit is the one lifting.

Somewhere in there you decided that a good word said over him now would be worthless. That it would be a man talking to himself in an empty kitchen, that it changes nothing, that it might even be a kind of self-comfort you have not earned. So you have not said one. You have made phone calls instead, because a phone call at least has a chance of connecting.

That is not facing facts. That is a man deciding the value of a word by whether he gets a receipt for it, and what is written never once measured a blessing that way. The Spirit has never required an audience.

A word spoken over your son stands over his life whether he hears it or not, whether he wants it or not, and whether he ever knows you said it. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one who carries it, and neither of those depends on a voicemail being set up.

Now hear what I am not doing, and hear it plainly, because this is where a man in your position gets sold something. I am not telling you that if you bless him he will ring. I have no authority whatsoever to promise you that, and any man who does is selling you a technique. A blessing is not a lever. It is not a way of working on somebody from a distance. What God does about that road is God's, entirely, and it may take a shape neither of us picks.

What is yours tonight is the saying, and the saying is a real thing and not a consolation prize. It is written that God told the priests to put His name upon the people and He would bless them (Numbers 6:27), which is God taking the blessing as His own job and leaving a person the speaking, and the Spirit has been running it that way ever since. Your part is small. It is also not nothing, and it is not conditional on being answered.