My Father Never Showed Me And I Will Not Ask Him Now

Devon's father is alive, is seventy one, lives forty minutes away, and knows a great deal about cars.

They speak. Not often, and not badly. There is nothing dramatic here. There was no falling out, no year of silence, no scene at a wedding. What there was, across a whole childhood, was a man who did things by himself in a garage with the door mostly closed, and a boy who was not called out to help, and who after a while stopped hanging about hoping to be.

Nobody in that family would say anything went wrong. His father would be genuinely bewildered to hear that anything did.

Devon is thirty one. He has a car. He does not know one thing about it.

And here is the whole knot, in one sentence: the only man he can imagine asking is the only man he cannot ask.

Because asking his father now would not be asking a question about a car. It would be a conversation with about twenty five years in it. It would mean, unavoidably, saying out loud a version of you never showed me, and even if he said it lightly, even if he laughed, his father would hear it, and something would land, and Devon would rather not know a single thing about a car for the rest of his life than do that to a seventy one year old man.

So he has decided, without ever calling it a decision, that this particular kind of knowledge is closed to him. Not difficult. Closed. As if there were one door and it has a person standing in it.

His friend from work, who is fifty and who fixes his own things, said in July, entirely casually, "Bring it round on Saturday, I'll show you."

And Devon said, "Ah, don't worry about it."

And then he sat in his flat that evening and could not work out why he had said no to a thing he wanted.

There was never only one door

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to tell you your father did wrong. I do not know that, and neither do you, and a man with a garage door mostly closed in 1998 may have been carrying things nobody in that house ever heard about. I am also not going to tell you to go and have the conversation. That is yours, and it may be right some day, and it is not what tonight is for.

What I want to say is much smaller and it is this: there was never only one door.

Now let me put the verse down, because David says something in it that is quietly enormous.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up.Psalm 27:10

Two things about that sentence before anything else.

The first is that "forsake" in the Hebrew there is broader than abandonment. It carries leaving off, letting go, not continuing with. It covers the parent who left, and it covers the parent who stayed in the house and stopped somewhere.

The second is what God undertakes to do. Not comfort. Not compensate. He says He will take up, which is the word for gathering somebody in and carrying on with them. It is a word about continuation. Whatever was set down, He picks up.

So the promise is not that God will make you feel better about a gap. It is that God has taken responsibility for the thing that stopped.

You are not a young man with one closed door, and Scripture has God undertaking the taking up of exactly what a parent left off. It is written that when my father and my mother forsake me then the Lord will take me up, which is a promise about continuation rather than about consolation, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a practical fact rather than a comforting idea.

You have been provided for in this the whole time, and the passage puts the picking up in God's hands rather than leaving it with the one who set it down. Psalm 27 gives the taking up to the Lord Himself, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an old psalm about parents into a Saturday morning with a man from work.

The man from work is not second best

Here is the part I most want to say, because it is where the thinking has gone wrong and it has gone wrong very reasonably.

In Devon's head there is a right way for this to have happened, and it involves his father and a garage and being fourteen. And because that did not happen, everything else feels like a substitute. A worse version. A patch.

And so a fifty year old man at work offering a Saturday reads, somewhere underneath, as charity for a boy whose dad did not.

That is not what it is.

Look again at what David actually says. He does not say the Lord will replace the parents. He says the Lord will take me up. And when you look at how God actually does that, in Scripture and in ordinary life, it is almost never by direct download. It is by people. It is a Jethro, a Naomi, an Ananias, a Barnabas. It is somebody who is not the person it should have been, doing the thing anyway.

A man at work offering a Saturday is not the consolation prize. In the arrangement God actually runs, a man at work offering a Saturday is the answer.

You have been offered exactly what the promise describes, and no verse anywhere ranks provision by whether it came from the person it should have. Psalm 27 puts the taking up in God's hands and leaves entirely open who His hands turn out to be, and the Spirit of God is what makes an ordinary invitation from a colleague the shape of an answer.

And I want to say something about your father, gently, because it matters to how you carry this.

Not asking him is not a failure of nerve. It might be love. A man of thirty one deciding not to hand a seventy one year old a bill he cannot pay is doing something decent, and it costs him, and God sees the cost and does not require the invoice.

You were never obliged to make your father pay for a thing he cannot pay for, and the written word puts the taking up on God rather than on a settlement between two men. Psalm 27 asks nothing of the parents in that verse at all, and His Spirit is what makes that absence a relief rather than an evasion.