What I Owe My Son and Have Not Said

They used to talk for forty minutes. That is the measurement he keeps coming back to, because it is the only one that is honest.

Sunday evening, both of them with the game on in different houses, and a phone call that started as a comment about a substitution and ended somewhere else entirely, most weeks. That went on for years. His wife used to laugh at the pair of them.

Now the calls are eight minutes. Nine, if there is something specific about the car.

It was the winter before last. The hours went and then the boiler went and then there was the funeral he had to travel for, and his son, who is twenty nine and does all right, said, dad, just let me, and transferred it that night before either of them could think about it.

Neither of them has said one word about it since.

He could pay some of it now. Not all. And that, if he is completely honest with himself sitting here, is precisely the problem, because saying I can do some of it means opening the whole subject, and the whole subject includes the winter, and the winter includes the version of him that had to be helped by his own boy.

So the calls got shorter. He did not decide that. It happened by itself, the way a man starts taking a different route without ever choosing to.

And two Sundays ago his son said, at about minute seven, right, well, I will let you go. And he heard something in it. Not annoyance. Something more like a young man being polite to somebody who has become slightly formal with him.

You know that call. Yours might be with a daughter, a brother, a friend from years back. There is one subject in the room, and to keep it from arriving you have made everything smaller, and the smallness is now doing more damage than the subject ever could.

Come and sit down. Let the tea go cold. There is a line of Jesus about settling things quickly, and it is not about courts at all, whatever it looks like.

There is no code, and there is a quickly

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I am not going to hold a man in your position with a hint of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that puts the money back so that you can have this conversation from a comfortable position. And I will say the pastoral thing straight after it: needing help in a bad winter is not a failure. It is a winter. Men your age were raised to hear those two as the same sentence and they are not, and a great deal of unnecessary distance has been built out of that confusion.

Here is what Jesus said, in the middle of a passage about anger and reconciliation.

Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him.Matthew 5:25

Now, the picture is a legal one, two men on the road to a hearing. But look at the word that carries it. Quickly, whiles thou art in the way. While you are still walking together. While there is still a shared road under both of you.

That is not about courts. That is about the fact that unresolved things do not stay the same size. They grow, and what they grow into is distance, and distance is much harder to undo than the original matter ever was.

Your original matter was a transfer on a bad night. Your current matter is a nine minute phone call and a young man saying I will let you go.

You are not in trouble with your son, and the thing that needs dealing with today is the distance rather than the money. That is not a soft reading arranged for a hard subject. It is what the word quickly is doing in that sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about two men on a road and lays it across a Sunday evening phone call.

You have a God who deals with things while the road is still shared, and He has never once waited until a man was in a position to pay. Scripture says quickly, whiles thou art in the way, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old phrase into something a father can do this week.

Now let me say the true thing, gently, because I have sat with a lot of men on this exact subject.

What you are protecting is not your finances. It is the order of the thing. You carried him. That is what a father does and it is most of your identity, and on one night in the winter before last the direction reversed, and you have not found a way to be a man who has been helped by his own son and still be his father.

And here is the part I most want you to hear. He does not experience it that way. To him it was a Tuesday and a transfer and his dad, and then the calls got short, and he has been quietly working out what he did wrong.

You are not diminished in his eyes, and the money never moved anything between you except in your own account of it. Scripture says that love beareth all things and endureth all things, and that is not a poem, it is a description of what is actually in the room on a Sunday, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man believe that about his own son rather than merely hope it.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a phone call does not lengthen because a man had a good think about it. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what resolving privately never does. So speak it, out loud, here, and then say it to him. You have the standing to tell a distance in your own family what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position rather than your provision, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a front room.