What You Are Afraid You Handed Down

His son is twenty and comes home for the weekend and is entirely pleasant about all of it, and the pleasantness is the thing that frightens him.

There is no rebellion here. Nobody slammed a door at seventeen and nobody has announced anything. The boy comes to the Christmas service without being asked, and helps stack chairs afterwards, and is warm with everybody, and answers questions about what he is studying, and is by every visible measure a credit to that household.

And there is a distance in him about the whole subject that has the quality of a decision already taken.

His father can feel it in the shape of the conversations. If you raise anything about faith directly, the boy is respectful and interested in the way you are interested in somebody else's hobby. He asks good questions. He never once argues, which would be better, and would mean something was live.

Here is what keeps the father awake, and it is very specific.

He is not afraid his son has met an argument he could not answer. That would be manageable, and there are answers, and the boy is clever enough to weigh them.

He is afraid his son has met him.

Twenty years at close range. The tiredness, the Sunday afternoons where his father was somewhere else behind his eyes, the year the phone would not stop, the way his mother's face went in the spring of the boy's fifteenth year. Nobody in that house ever criticized the church in front of the children, ever, on principle. But children do not require criticism. They require a floor and a set of years, and they draw their own conclusions.

And the conclusion available to a boy who watched carefully for twenty years is this: it takes everything, and it does not give it back.

That is what the father is afraid he handed down. Not doubt. Not a bad argument. A costing, done by a child with good data, and filed.

Look at whose house the line ran through

Paul writes to a young man and does something unusual at the top of the letter: he traces a line backwards through a family.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.2 Timothy 1:5

Three generations named. Lois, Eunice, Timothy. It is one of the warmest sentences in the letters.

Now notice who is not in it.

Timothy's father. He appears once in Acts, and the whole description we get of him is that he was a Greek. He is never named, never described as a believer, and the text does not tell us what he thought about any of it.

So the line Paul is praising ran through a household that was not uniform. It went grandmother to mother to son, past a man about whom Scripture is entirely silent, and it arrived unfeigned, which is a word meaning unmasked, un-performed, without a stage face on it.

So hear this, in a hallway with a bag on the floor: what runs in a family does not run because a household was clean. That is not my reassurance; it is what His word does with an actual family tree, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a genealogy that untidy and makes it breathable for a man lying awake.

Now let me deal with the costing, because your son's arithmetic deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed.

He is not wrong about the data. It did take a great deal. There were Sunday afternoons where you were behind your own eyes and there was a spring when his mother's face changed, and he saw all of it and he was right to see it. Any message that tells you he misread his childhood is lying to you and would not survive a conversation with him.

What he cannot have seen, at fifteen, from where he was standing, is the other column.

He watched the cost land. He could not watch what was carrying it. A child sees a father come in at nine at night with nothing left; a child cannot see the thing that got that father up on the Monday, because it does not happen in the hallway and it has no visible shape. Your son has been doing his sums with one column of the accounts, honestly, for twenty years.

You have not handed him a verdict. His word records a faith arriving unfeigned in a house where at least one adult is a complete blank in the record, and the Holy Spirit is not restricted to households that made a good showing.

And here is the one I want to leave you holding, and I am going to be careful, because I will not promise you an outcome and nobody honest can.

I do not know what your son does. Nobody does. What I know is that Paul writes that sentence about a young man who was already grown, and that the line in that family had already skipped past somebody, and that the God who ran it through a Greek man's house without needing his permission has never once been blocked by a household's arithmetic.

Your son is not out of reach because he watched carefully. Scripture nowhere puts a grown child's faith under a parent's authority, and the Holy Spirit works in a twenty year old at His own pace and by His own means, which are not visible from a hallway.