The Family Is in the Corridor and I Am the One in Here

The doctor said hours rather than days at about six o'clock and she said it kindly and she did not soften it.

Everybody came. Your sister drove four hours. Your uncle, who has not been in a hospital since your aunt, came and sat in the corridor and has not gone in, and nobody is going to make him.

And at about eleven the nurse said something to the effect that it might be good for people to take turns, and there was a bit of shuffling and looking at each other, and somehow it ended up being you.

So you are in here. Chair pulled up. His hand in yours, which is a thing you have done perhaps twice in your adult life and which is now simply what is happening.

His breathing has the sound in it that everybody has warned you about.

And the thing you cannot get past, sitting here with a jug of water nobody is going to drink, is that you have no idea what to say. You have been in this chair forty minutes and you have said, in total: I'm here, Dad. Twice.

There are things you could say. You know what they are. You are not going to say them, and it is not because they are not true. It is that this is not a man who would know what to do with them, and you are not going to hand him something at eleven at night that he has to work out how to receive.

But you cannot sit here for two hours saying nothing.

An old man did this from a bed

Sit where you are. Do not let go of his hand. I am not going to ask you about your relationship with your father, and I am not going to tell you to say the things.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not have me making a son feel worse at eleven at night: forty minutes of holding a man's hand is not nothing, and I'm here, Dad is not a poor showing. Nobody in that corridor is on trial either, including your uncle. People do this differently and none of the ways is wrong.

Now come and look at the oldest deathbed in the book, and look at what the old man does with his last strength.

All these are the twelve tribes of Israel: and this is it that their father spake unto them, and blessed them; every one according to his blessing he blessed them.Genesis 49:28

Jacob. Old, blind, propped up on a bed, at the very end. His sons standing round him, and it is not a tidy family; that chapter has some hard things in it and he says several of them out loud.

And what he does, with the last of it, is bless them. One at a time. The chapter is long because he does every single one.

Then two verses later he gathers up his feet into the bed and dies.

That is what a deathbed is for, in the oldest account we have of one: a mouth still working and something good going out of it.

A bed at eleven at night is exactly where this has always been done, and God has never once required the family to be tidy first. That is not me consoling a man in a chair. That is what is written, and what Jacob did with his last hour, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a side room with a jug of water in it.

Here is what nobody explains at a bedside. When you speak a blessing over your father, you are not summing anything up and you are not settling anything between you. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a man He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. Which means it does not have to cover thirty years and it does not have to be well made.

You are not being asked to produce anything in this room, and nothing about his life or yours rests on how well you say it. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, and it is the Spirit who carries a word from a Father in heaven through an ordinary son in a chair. The weight is His. The voice is yours. Those are two different jobs and you only have one of them.

Why the things you could say are not the thing

Now let me name it, because your instinct at ten past eleven is right and I want you to know it is right.

The things you could say would be about the two of you. They would require him to receive something, to react, to be a participant in a conversation, at an hour when he cannot be. And you sensed that, and declined, and that was not cowardice; it was accuracy.

A blessing does not work like that. It is not a conversation and it does not need a reply. It goes over a person rather than between two people. It can be said to a man who cannot answer, and it asks nothing of him at all.

That is precisely why it fits a room like this one, and why it has been used in rooms like this one for four thousand years.

There is something you can say that does not require him to do anything with it. 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 work and assigning a person nothing but the saying, and the Spirit has been running it that way ever since. Your part is small on purpose. It is also the part nobody else in that corridor is in the room to do.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you he will hear it, and I am not telling you he will not, and I have no authority to tell you what a man registers at this stage; nobody does, and anybody who is certain either way is guessing at your father. And I am not telling you that saying it settles anything between the two of you. That belongs to God.

What you say over him will stand over him whether or not he knows you said it. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a man in a chair at eleven at night saying twenty words to somebody who cannot answer is doing exactly what Jacob did.