Twelve Years of Goodbyes and Not One of Them Believes

The oldest was seven when you started and she is nineteen now and she was in the front seat on Sunday with her feet on the dashboard, which her mother allows and you do not comment on.

Six of them. Two families, one car each, and they always leave within about twenty minutes of each other because it is a long drive for both.

And every single time, at the car door, before they get in, you put your hand on a head and you say the same blessing over that one, by name, out loud, in front of everybody. Twelve years of it. In rain. In a car park at a service station once when a lift got complicated. At the airport when the middle one went traveling.

They are used to it. That is the honest description. The little ones stand still for it because they always have. The nineteen year old ducks it slightly now, in a good-humored way, and lets you do it anyway, and you love her for that more than she will ever know.

On Sunday the last car went and you stood on the drive with your hand still half up and did a sum you have been avoiding for about two years.

Not one of the six believes anything. Not one.

The nineteen year old is polite about it. One of the boys is definite about it in the way that fifteen year olds are. The rest simply do not think about it and never have, and nothing in their week contains it.

Twelve years. Hundreds of car doors. And you cannot point at one thing.

The psalm has more generations in it than you can see

Come and sit on that wall a minute before you go in. I am not going to ask what you think went wrong.

Let me put the true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not have me being soft with a man doing sums on a driveway: you have not been doing it wrong. Nothing in this article is going to suggest that a different wording, or more conviction, or explaining it properly to them, or doing it privately rather than in front of everybody, would have produced faith in six young people. Anybody who says that to you is guessing, and what they are doing is making six free souls into a grandfather's report card, and God has never once done that.

Now come and look at a verse that is about exactly this and is longer than most people read it.

One generation shall praise thy works to another, and shall declare thy mighty acts.Psalm 145:4

The whole psalm is David at the end, doing what old men do, which is thinking about what carries on after them. And what he describes is not a transfer between two people. It is a relay across generations, plural, ongoing, and the psalm goes on for another seventeen verses about God's own faithfulness underneath it.

Notice what is not there. There is no verse in which the person declaring gets to see the result of their declaring. The relay is described from above, as a thing God sustains across time, and nobody standing in it is given a view of the whole track.

Twelve years of car doors put you inside a relay you were never given the length of, and you are being asked to hand something on rather than to arrive somewhere. That is not me consoling a man on a Sunday evening. That is what is written, and what the psalm describes and what it conspicuously does not offer, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a garden wall with a car pulling away at the end of the road.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing grandchildren. When you say those words at the car door, you are not producing faith in anybody. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about six people He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it, and He does not command their wills, and neither do you, and He is not obliged to show you anything before you die.

A blessing is not an input, and a fifteen year old's opinion is not its readout. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29), and the Spirit has never handed a grandfather a scoreboard. What was revealed to you is that an old man speaks good over his family. That you have done, hundreds of times, in the rain.

The sum you have been avoiding

Now let me name it, because you named it yourself on that drive and it deserves daylight.

Twelve years and not one of them. That is not despair. It is arithmetic arriving where arithmetic does not belong. Hundreds of blessings, six visible positions, and a mind that has been keeping quiet accounts for two years finally reads the total out loud on a driveway.

And the thing a sum like that does to a man of seventy-four is specific: it does not make him love them less. It makes him wonder whether the car door thing is now just a habit that embarrasses a nineteen year old, and once that thought is in, a man starts to feel foolish, and a man who feels foolish stops.

Not with a decision. He is just slightly slower to the door next time, and then the cars go while he is still in the kitchen.

That is not faithlessness and I will not call it that. It is what happens when love and a visible outcome stand on a driveway together for twelve years. And what is written never once invited you to compute it, and the Spirit is not sitting on the wall beside you with the figures.

God did not ask you to produce faith in those six, and He has never once made another person's belief the grade on a grandfather's obedience. It is written that every one of us shall give account of himself to God (Romans 14:12), which is God assigning each of those six their own file, and the same Spirit who breathed that is on this drive with you, which is why it lands as a ruling and not as a comfort.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you they will come to faith if you keep going, and I am not telling you they will not. I have no authority to promise you six souls as a return on twelve years, and any man who does is trading in your grandchildren. What God does in them is His, entirely, and it may take a shape neither of us picks and neither of us lives to see.

What I can put in your hands is this: hundreds of blessings have not come back to God empty, and every one of those six can tell you exactly what happens at that car door. God's word does not come back to Him void (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and six young people who believe nothing at all have, between them, several hundred memories of an old man's hand on their head.