I Cannot Do That To My Dad

You have run the scene about forty times and it always goes the same way.

You say it. He says something reasonable. And then there is the face, and the face is the thing you cannot get past: the specific way his face would do the thing it does when he is disappointed and is trying very hard not to be.

And then, in the version you have built, the whole of the last two years unravels. The pride he had in the spring. The thing he said to his brother at the wedding. The way he tells people what you are doing.

So you have not said it. Nine weeks now.

Here is what I want to name at the very start, and it is going to sound like a small technical point and it is not.

You have never asked him.

Everything in that scene is your own construction. The face, the disappointment, the unravelling. Not one element of it has come from your father, who has said nothing whatsoever on the subject, because he has not been given the opportunity.

How shall I go up to my father

There is a moment in Genesis where a man stands in front of a ruler and says the truest sentence in the whole story.

For how shall I go up to my father, and the lad be not with me? lest peradventure I see the evil that shall come on my father. (Genesis 44:34, King James Version)

That is Judah, and he is doing exactly what has been happening in that room for nine weeks.

He is standing in a difficult situation, and the thing driving every decision he makes is a picture of his father's face. Lest I see the evil that shall come on my father. He is not managing his own risk. He is managing what he believes a piece of news would do to an old man at home.

And the whole speech he makes is the turning point of the entire story.

You are doing a thing that Scripture treats as the mark of a good son, and caring what a piece of news would do to your father has never once been a fault in anybody. Genesis 44:34 puts the father's face at the center of a man's decision and calls it the turning point, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a room with somebody who has run the scene forty times.

Now, the crucial difference, which is where all the practical help is.

Judah says it out loud.

He does not carry the picture privately and act on it in silence. He stands in front of the person who needs to hear it and speaks the whole of it, including the part about his father's face, and it is precisely the speaking of it that changes everything that follows.

The picture in his head is the same as yours. What he does with it is the opposite.

You have the same picture and a different option, and a thing carried privately for nine weeks has never once done what the same thing does when it is said out loud. The written word makes the speech itself the hinge of the story, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a thing from the inside of a young man into the air.

The version you wrote for him

Now the practical part, and it is the hardest sentence in this piece.

You have written your own father's reaction and filed it as information, and forty runs of a scene have never once been the same as one answer from the man himself. The Holy Spirit is the one who separates a construction from a fact, and Genesis 44:34 has a son speaking about his father's face out loud rather than acting on it in silence.

That is what the forty runs of the scene have produced: an extremely detailed, entirely internal document about what a specific man would feel, constructed by somebody who has not asked him and who is nineteen.

And the reason it feels like knowledge is that you do know him. Nineteen years of watching a man makes most of him genuinely predictable. So the scene feels reliable.

But there is a whole category of thing about your father that you have never seen, because it has never come up: what he does when his son tells him something hard about himself. Nobody knows that until it happens.

You are predicting from a set of observations that never contained this, and nineteen years of knowing somebody has never once included the thing they have not been asked yet. Genesis 44:34 has a man saying out loud what he believed news would do to his father rather than acting on it silently, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates knowing a man from guessing about him.

And here is the part that would matter most to him, if he knew.

Something has been taken away from him.

Not deliberately. But there is a thing a father is for, and this is exactly it, and for nine weeks he has been kept out of the one situation in his son's life where he would most want to be standing.

If he found out in two years that you had gone through this and decided in advance that he could not handle it, that would land on him considerably harder than the news itself ever would.

Wanting to come home is not a verdict on anybody.

You are able to give him back a thing he was made for, and a father kept out of his son's hardest month has never once been a father who was protected. Genesis 44:34 puts a man's speech about his father in front of everybody rather than leaving it in him, and the Spirit of God is the one who hands a father his own job back.

Tell him and let him have his own reaction

So here is the thing to do, and the second half of it is the entire discipline.

Tell your father the true thing. And let him have his own reaction to it, rather than the one that has been written for him.

The true thing, plainly. I want to come home, and I have not said it because of what I thought it would do to you.

You are able to say both halves out loud, and a true sentence with the reason attached has never once been harder for a father to receive than a silence he could not explain. The Holy Spirit is the one in the moment when a son finally says it, and it is written in Genesis 44:34 that a man spoke about his own father's face in front of everybody.

And then watch what actually happens, and this is where the discipline is required.

There will be a first reaction. It may include some version of the face. And then, four or five seconds later, there will be a second one, and the second one is the real one, and it is the one nobody has ever seen and that has been predicted for nine weeks.

Do not act on the first three seconds. Do not start apologizing or softening or taking it back. Wait for the second reaction, because the first is a man absorbing news and the second is a man responding to his son.

You are able to wait five seconds for the real answer, and a first expression has never once been the same as a father's actual response. Scripture records the whole speech and then records what the other man did after hearing it, in that order, and the same Spirit who kept them in that order is with you when you speak.

And if what has been sitting under these nine weeks is bigger than wanting to come home, if it has begun to carry thoughts about not being here at all, that does not wait for a good moment with your father. Tell somebody today, out loud, in person if you can, and if it is urgent go to an emergency room or ring an emergency number where you are.