I Left Something At His Age

You have not thought about it properly in about twenty years.

And then he rang on Sunday and said the word, and there it was, entirely intact: the room, the man behind the desk, the walk down to the bus, and the particular quality of the afternoon.

Nineteen. Three months in. And you walked.

Nothing dramatic happened afterward. That is what nobody understands about it. Your life has been a good life. There was work and a marriage and this house and these children, and you have not spent forty years in mourning.

But there has been a sentence, kept somewhere near the front, and the sentence is: I should have stayed.

And it has done a job all these years. It has been the thing you reached for whenever anything got hard: do not do what you did at nineteen. Finish the thing. See it through.

And on Sunday your son said he wants to leave, and that sentence stood straight up, and everything you have said to him since Sunday has come out of it.

Here is the thing I want to put in front of you, and it is not comfortable: you have not been talking to your son this week. You have been talking to a nineteen year old in 1986, and he cannot hear you, and your son is being handed a decision that has somebody else's name on it.

Remember ye not the former things

There is a line in Isaiah that sounds impossible until you notice what it is actually asking.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. (Isaiah 43:18, King James Version)

It cannot mean forget your past. Scripture is full of remembering, and the same book insists on it constantly, and God is described as the one who remembers everything.

Look at the second verb, because the second verb is the instruction. Neither consider. Do not weigh it. Do not reason from it. Do not use the old thing as the material you build the present decision out of.

You are asked to stop reasoning from it rather than to stop remembering it, and forty years of a story has never once been a thing you are required to forget. Isaiah 43:18 puts the weight on considering rather than on remembering, and the Holy Spirit is the one in a house on the Tuesday after a phone call.

Now, why it matters here specifically.

The former thing has one enormous advantage in any argument, which is that it already happened. It comes with an outcome attached and it feels like data. And so a man reasoning from 1986 is not reasoning from a story, he is reasoning from what feels like evidence, and evidence is very difficult to argue with even when it is about a completely different person in a completely different year.

You are holding a story that has been dressed as evidence, and one man's nineteenth year has never once been able to predict another man's. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a man which of the two he has been doing, and the written word refuses the considering rather than the memory.

What you actually know and what you do not

Now let me separate two things that have been welded together in you since about 1986.

The first thing is what happened. You left. That is a fact and it is yours.

The second thing is what it meant. I should have stayed, and leaving was the mistake, and if I had finished it my life would have gone differently.

The second one is not a fact. It has never once been tested. There is no version of your life available anywhere in which you stayed, and so the sentence you have carried for forty years is a conclusion drawn from an experiment that was never run.

You are carrying a conclusion and not a finding, and forty years of certainty about a thing that never happened have never once made it into evidence. Isaiah 43:18 tells a people not to reason from what is behind them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes apart a welded joint that has been holding since 1986.

And here is the second separation, and it is the one that will free your son.

His nineteen is not your nineteen.

Different decade. Different reason. Different thing being left. And, most importantly, a different man, who has a father who stayed close to him and who is telling him about it, which is precisely what you did not have.

The single most important difference between his situation and the one in 1986 is that he is being counseled by somebody who loves him. And that difference exists only when the counsel is happening in the actual room, rather than through an argument with a past that is standing behind his face.

A change of course is not a verdict on a young man.

You are able to give him the thing you did not have, and being nineteen in a different decade has never once been the same situation twice. Isaiah 43:18 refuses the reasoning from old things and points forward, and the Spirit of God is the one who returns a father to the actual room and the actual boy.

Tell him the story with no conclusion

So here is the thing to do, and it is the opposite of hiding it and it is also the opposite of using it.

Tell him about the thing you left at nineteen, once, as a story about you. And do not attach any conclusion to it.

Tell it properly. The room, the man behind the desk, the walk to the bus, the afternoon. What you felt like. What you told your parents. What you did the following week.

And then stop. No lesson, no therefore, no and that is why I am asking you to think carefully.

You are able to give him a story rather than a warning, and forty years of your own life have never once needed a moral attached to be worth handing over. The Holy Spirit is the one in a room where a man tells his son something true about himself and then closes his mouth, and it is written in Isaiah 43:18 to consider not the things of old.

Here is why the missing conclusion is the entire gift.

With a conclusion, the story is an argument, and he will hear it as one and defend himself against it, and the whole of your 1986 will land on him as pressure.

Without a conclusion, it is his father telling him something. He will do his own thinking with it, and whatever he concludes will be his, and it will be genuinely useful to him precisely because nobody told him what to take from it.

And he will remember, for the rest of his life, that his father told him about a hard thing without using it.

You are handing him material instead of a verdict, and a story with nothing on the end of it has never once been less useful than a story with a lesson on it. Scripture points a whole people away from reasoning out of what is behind them, and the same Spirit who wrote that line is with you when you finish the story and stop.