Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4 (NIV)
What a Father Is Given
He says the same four sentences at the bedroom door every night, and has since the boy was six. That God made him. That God is not tired of him. That nothing he does today puts him outside that. That his father will be here in the morning. He got them out of a book, because his own father gave him nothing to say and he had to go and find some.
The boy is fourteen now and has stopped answering. Some nights he says them to a shut door and a light under it.
The training belongs to the Lord, and so does the instruction. Paul tells fathers not to exasperate their children, and then hands them this: bring your children up in it. The material was never the father’s to invent. A father who has run out of anything good of his own still has this to hand over, because it never came from him in the first place.
Do not exasperate is the first half, and it is the half this could fail. The same four sentences at a door for eight years can be a gift and can be a weight, and the difference isn’t in the sentences. A boy can hear the same words as something said over him or something said at him, and the man in the hall does not get to decide which.
That is the whole weight of the verse and it is easy to walk past. The thing a man is told to give his children is not drawn out of what kind of man he is. It was made somewhere else and put into his hands, and his job is to pass it along, and a man with nothing of his own is not thereby disqualified.
Today is long for anyone whose father brought him none of it, and no verse in this letter turns that into something else. If you are sure you already ruined it, the work is in front of you anyway, and it was never made out of you to begin with.
I decided years ago that I would answer the phone when I don’t feel like answering it, and I have kept that one. All it proves is that the phone gets answered.
Four sentences, at the door, on a Saturday in the middle of June. Nothing comes back through it. He says them and goes down.
A Prayer to Remember
I got almost none of this handed to me, Father, and I’ve spent years deciding that disqualifies me. Give me the words I don’t have, and make me say them tonight to the person in my house. And make me slow to decide which fathers are past being any good to their children.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
