Four Generations of Leaving

It is a Thursday, about half past six, and there is nothing whatever happening.

The boy is seven and is lying on his front on the rug with his legs in the air, working on something involving a cardboard box and an unreasonable amount of tape. The television is on with the sound down. Somebody is running a tap in the kitchen. His father is in the armchair with his boots off and a mug going cold on the arm, doing nothing at all, which is a thing he has only recently learned how to do.

Here is what is behind the man in the chair, and he could recite it in his sleep.

His great-grandfather went to sea in his twenties and did not come back. Not lost. There is a photograph of him, much later, on a step somewhere warm, standing next to people nobody in this family can name.

His grandfather went out one morning when his own son was four and was never seen again by anyone in the house.

His father left when he was eleven. That one came back twice, both times for a weekend, both times with something in a carrier bag, and the second time the boy did not come downstairs.

And him. Four years ago, in the bad stretch, he went and stayed with a friend from work for nine days. He came home on the tenth. Nobody in this house has ever mentioned it since, not once, and he thinks about it most weeks, and he has never been able to decide whether the silence is mercy or evidence.

So that is four. Four men, one line, one door.

And on this Thursday, out of nowhere, the boy says, without looking up from the tape, are you coming Saturday.

And he says, yes.

And the boy says, okay.

That is it. That is the whole exchange. The boy goes straight back to the box, and does not look up, and does not check, and does not say it again in a slightly different way to see whether the answer holds the second time.

The man sits there for about fifteen seconds. Then he gets up and goes into the kitchen and stands with both hands on the edge of the sink and looks out at the yard, and it takes him a while.

Because he knows exactly what he just watched, and he has no experience of it whatsoever. A boy in this family believed a man in this family the first time, and went back to what he was doing.

Not one of them, going back as far as anybody can count, has ever been believed without checking.

You have your own list. It might not be doors. It might be money, or drink, or a temper, or a room everybody learned to be quiet in. But you know how many there have been, and you know that you are the one currently standing in the place where it usually happens.

Who does the setting

Before anything else, I want to be clear about what I am not going to do with your family, because a great deal of harm gets done at exactly this point.

I am not going to call your grandfather a curse. I am not going to prosecute four dead men from a page, and Scripture does not hand me the papers to do it. What Scripture does is name what was absent, plainly, without flinching, and then say who supplies it. That is a completely different act and it leaves you standing rather than fighting.

Here is the naming and the supplying, in two lines of one psalm.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains.Psalm 68:5-6

Read the second sentence again and find the subject of the verb. God setteth. Not the line sets. Not the good years set, not the man who finally stayed sets. God does the setting, and what He sets the solitary into is a family.

So the household you are sitting in on a Thursday evening was not inherited. It was assembled, and it was assembled by Someone with a long record of putting people who had nobody into houses where there is somebody.

You are not the fourth link in a chain, and right now, as you read, you are being told what you actually are: a man God set in a house. Scripture puts the verb in His hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that off the page and into an armchair with cold tea on the arm.

He took the title Himself

Look at the first line again, because it comes before the setting and it is the reason the setting happens.

A father of the fatherless. That is God naming Himself, in His holy habitation, by the exact gap in your family tree. Of all the titles available to Him, that is one He chose and wrote down.

Which means the absence in your line was never unattended. I am not going to tell you what God did in your grandfather's life or your father's, because I do not know and I will not invent it. What I will tell you is the title He took over boys with nobody at the door, and He is not a God who takes a title and then leaves the post empty.

You have a Father in that holy habitation, and it is written and it is not a figure of speech, and His Spirit is the one who teaches a man to say the word Father without his voice doing something strange.

The first man in it had no precedent either

Now here is the thing that settles this category, and it is easy to miss because we know the story too well.

Joshua, standing at Shechem, reminds Israel where they came from: your fathers dwelt on the other side of the river in old time, and they served other gods (Joshua 24:2). That is Abraham's own father he is talking about. The man God started the whole covenant with had no family precedent for it whatsoever. Nothing behind him. No example, no tradition, nobody to copy, not one generation of it anywhere in his line.

And the covenant began anyway, because it did not begin with his family. It began with God, who spoke to a man in a place with no history of this and told him to go.

That is your position exactly. What you are standing in did not start with you and it does not depend on there having been a version of it behind you. You are the first man in this line to be in it, and you are not the first man to be first.

You are inside a covenant that began with God rather than with your line, and Scripture is the record of how it started with a man whose own father had none of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has put you where you are standing on a Thursday.

And the nine days

I am not going to walk past those, and neither have you.

Here is what they are and what they are not. They are nine days you went away and came back, which is nine days more than you wanted and one homecoming more than anybody before you managed. They are not the true reading of you that the rest is covering up. And they are not the thing holding this house together, because the house is held by the One who set you in it.

That silence in your kitchen is not evidence being kept. Nobody is building a case. You are held in this family by God's own placing, and Scripture says He sets the solitary in households, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on that and not your unbroken record.