The Man Who Raised Me

He has done better. That is the thing everybody says and it is entirely true and it settles nothing.

He has never once put a hand on either of his children. He knows the name of every teacher they have ever had. He has been at things, hundreds of them, standing at the back in the cold, and he was at every one on purpose, and he could tell you exactly why.

His father was at none of them.

That is the polite version and it is the only version going in this article, because what happened in that house is his and not mine and not the reader's.

His father is eighty-three and lives two counties over in a bungalow with a carer who comes on Wednesdays. There have been four phone calls in nine years, all of them practical, all of them short. Nobody in his family is under any illusion about the state of things and nobody talks about it.

And people say the thing to him. His wife has said it, twice, years apart, and both times carefully. A man at his church said it about eighteen months ago, kindly, at the end of a men's breakfast: you will regret it if you never drive up there. You have to forgive him.

And everything in him refuses. Not with a maybe. It is an old, whole, physical no that arrives before any thought does, and he is tired of it being treated as the same thing as unforgiveness, and he is tired of two sentences being handed to him joined at the hip: forgive him, and drive up there.

You know that no. There is somebody you are supposed to release and everything in you refuses, and somebody has bolted a visit onto the end of it, and nobody has ever asked what the refusal is standing guard over.

Sit down at this table. That is where this starts.

What the refusal is protecting

Let me tell you what is being guarded, because once it is named the fight tends to go out of it.

Your no is protecting a boy.

Not the man he is now, at fifty-four, with a truck and a mortgage and two grown children who like him. The one who was eight. Because somewhere in you there is a conviction, never stated out loud, that releasing the man is the same act as saying it was not that bad, and the only person that lie would be told about is a child who had nobody in the room to say otherwise. So the no comes up on his behalf. It has been coming up on his behalf for forty-six years, and it is loyal, and it is not sin.

Good. Keep refusing that. Nothing in Scripture asks you to say it was not that bad, and forgiveness has never once meant agreeing to a false account of a house.

You were seen in that house by a God who keeps the record straight, and Psalm 56 says He has kept count of your tossings and put your tears in His bottle, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked a man to revise a childhood in order to be free of it.

Hear it plainly: releasing your father is not excusing him. It does not shrink it. It is not a finding that no harm was done. It is not saying he did his best with what he had, and it is not saying that everybody's father was like that, which they were not.

Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.Ephesians 4:31-32

Read what that passage is actually asking to be put away. Not the truth. Not the record. The corrosion. The thing that eats the container it is kept in. And read the standard it sets for the forgiving: as God in Christ forgave you, which is a release that cost somebody something and never once pretended the debt was imaginary.

You have somewhere to put what he did that is not your own chest, and Ephesians 4 sets the pattern as a real release of a real debt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who opens a hand that has been closed since a man was eight.

Release is not reconciling and it is not trusting

Now the sentence I want you to have before another word, because men carry this to their graves on a misunderstanding.

Releasing him is not reconciling with him. It is not trusting him. It is not driving two counties over, not sitting in that front room, not putting your children within reach of him, and not saying one word to him about any of it, ever. Not one verse in Scripture about forgiveness requires a man to go and see anybody, and I am not going to tell you to.

The man at the breakfast joined two things that Scripture keeps apart, and he did it out of kindness, and he was still wrong to do it. You are free to release your father completely and never enter that bungalow, and it is written that so far as it depends on you, you live peaceably with all, which is a sentence with a limit built into it on purpose, and the Spirit is what steadies a man while his hands come open.

Nothing here requires him to admit anything, to remember it, to change, or ever to know that this has happened.

Nobody is putting a clock on you

And one more, before the turn, because the man at the breakfast used the word regret and it has been sitting in you ever since like a stone.

If you cannot do this today, then you cannot, and you are not in sin for it. There is no timetable anywhere in Scripture for this, and I am not going to build one out of a man's age. Forty-six years is not a scandal. A man still refusing is not a man who has failed; he is a man guarding a boy who had nobody, and he has never been shown where to set the case down.

You are not being accused at this table, and nowhere is it written that an unfinished release is disobedience, and it is the Holy Spirit and not a warning about regret who does this work in a man.