My Uncle Had No Soft Words

Your boy comes out of that gate at ten past three like he is being fired from something, and he hits you in the middle at full speed, every day, without fail.

And every day you say the same four things. Good day? Where is your jumper. Did you eat the apple. Get in the car.

You are not a cold man. Anybody watching would say you are a good dad, and they would be right. You are there at ten past three, which your uncle managed twice in eleven years, and you have never once raised your voice to that child.

It is just that when the boy is hanging off your arm and looking up at you with his whole face open, waiting, there is a space where something should go, and you have nothing to put in it.

You know exactly where the nothing came from.

Your uncle took you in when you were six and he did it properly. He fed you. He kept you dry. He got you to school and he taught you to fish and to fix a gutter and to keep your word, and he did all of it without ever once saying a soft thing to you out loud in eleven years. Not because he was cruel. He was not cruel. He simply did not have the words, and neither did the man who raised him, and that is a chain going back further than anybody in your family can name.

So you stand at the gate at ten past three with your son's whole face turned up at you, and you say did you eat the apple, and you drive home.

God is described as singing over people

Stand still with me here at this gate a minute. I am not going to hurry you and I am not going to ask you to say anything about your uncle that is not true.

Let me start where it has to start. That man is not on trial in this article, and I will not put him there. He fed you for eleven years. Scripture is clear about what a man like that did, and the Spirit is not in the business of prosecuting a decent man who ran out of words. He gave you what he had. What he had was gutters and fishing line and a roof, and those are not nothing; those are what love looks like when it has no vocabulary. The absence is real, and an absence is not a verdict on him or on you.

Now let me show you a picture of God that most men never get shown.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Sit with what He is doing in that sentence. Not inspecting. Not instructing. Not counting whether the apple got eaten. Singing. Out loud, over His people, with joy, because He wants to.

You are the one He is described as singing over, and He has been doing it since long before you learned there was nothing to say. That is not a warm thought I am offering a tired father at a school gate. That is what is written, in a prophet, in that order, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lets it land on a man standing on a pavement at ten past three.

Here is the thing nobody explained to you, and nobody explained it to your uncle either. When a father says something good over a son, he is not manufacturing it. He is agreeing out loud with what God has already said about that boy. His mouth is a door. God is the one walking through it. And if the power were in the mouth, then a boy raised by a silent man would be an unblessed man for life, and the chain would be unbreakable, and God has never written a rule like that.

You are not shorter of anything because your house was quiet. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), all of it, past tense, finished, and the Spirit is the one who carries a settled thing out of heaven and into the chest of a man who was six when he arrived at that door with a bag.

What eleven silent years actually taught you

Now let me name the wound properly, because I do not believe in lifting a thing before it has been named.

You have quietly concluded that men in your family are simply built without that part. That the words are for other kinds of people, from other kinds of houses, and that a man like you does his loving with lifts to school and a full fridge, and that wanting more than that is a soft idea somebody sold you. And underneath that, quieter still, is the thought that the reason nobody said it over you is that there was nothing much to say.

That is not realism. That is a man doing his own accounting in a dark room, and what is written never once entered that figure against you. The Spirit is here to say so out loud on a pavement.

God has known your name since before that island had a road on it, and He has never confused you with the silence you were raised in. It is written that He knew you before He formed you (Jeremiah 1:5), and the same Spirit who breathed that line into a prophet is holding it up in front of you now, which is why it reads as evidence rather than as encouragement.

And hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you the silence was secretly fine, or that it made you strong, or any of that. Eleven years of a good man with no words cost you something real and I am not going to paint over it. What I am telling you is that the blessing was never in your uncle's keeping, so his not having it never meant you did not get it.

The chain stops being unbreakable the moment you find out where the words actually come from. They come from God, who is described as singing, and it is His Spirit who puts a settled word into an ordinary mouth. That is written into how blessing has always worked, and it means a man does not need to have received one from a person in order to have one to give.