Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged.
Colossians 3:20-21 (NIV)
A Limit for the Father
By six the fish hall is loud. A man is making his way down the line of stalls with a boy behind him, and the boy’s carrying the bag with both arms because he asked to. At the third stall he sets it down on the wet floor to get a look at the crabs, and his father lifts it back up and carries it himself.
Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. Paul says both of those to one household, a household that had slaves living in it.
The obedience he asks of a child belongs inside a home that’s under Christ, and it doesn’t cover what anyone there does to harm him. Where a house is doing a child harm, the command lands on the father, and no child there is being told to bear it.
I get nervous around this one, and then I notice what Paul actually asks of the father, and the nerves let up. Discouragement doesn’t arrive all at once; a boy corrected at every turn, in the tone that says the correction was overdue, stops offering things. Paul says so to the father, the one in that house with the authority to cause it.
A limit is the kind of thing a man can start keeping the same hour he hears about it. The next time he opens his mouth at home, the whole instruction is available to him, and none of it waits on the children to go first.
At the door the boy asks for the bag back and gets it. Outside it’s still cold enough to see their breath, and they carry it to the car between them, a handle each.
A Prayer to Remember
Slow my voice down before it reaches anyone who can’t answer it. You’ve heard me use the tone I mean, so there’s no describing it to you. I’ve made a person smaller that way and then told myself it was nothing much. Let me ask something today and wait through the whole answer instead of filling it in.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
