I Am Forty One And I Still Check

Andrés has bought two houses, changed careers once, married a woman his father did not initially approve of, and raised three children who are turning out well.

And he rang his father from the car park before he signed the second house.

Not to ask. He wants that distinction made because it is the whole of the problem. He was not asking permission. He was forty-one years old and the decision was made and the money was his and the appointment was in eleven minutes.

He rang to hear the tone.

That is it exactly. He does not need the words. He needs about nine seconds of his father's voice, and inside those nine seconds there is a tone, and if the tone is the good one then the thing he has already decided becomes real, and if it is the other one, the flat one, then he goes in and signs anyway and something is wrong with the whole thing for about two years.

He signed that house four years ago. It is a good house. His children are happy in it.

And it has never once felt entirely like his.

His father is eighty. His father is not cruel and has never been cruel, and that is not a defensive statement, it is accurate: he is a quiet man who worked shifts for thirty-eight years to put three children through school, and he has never in his life said a harsh word to Andrés.

He has also never quite said the other thing, and Andrés has spent forty-one years standing in front of a door waiting for it to open, and the man behind it does not know there is a door.

I am a grown man with grown children and nothing I do becomes real until I have heard nine seconds of his voice.

And here is where I stop talking about Andrés, because you have got your own nine seconds, and you have rung from your own car park.

Let me say the first thing before we go anywhere: nothing here is against your father. There will be no sentence in this that commands him, or predicts him, or asks God to change him. He is not the subject and he is not on trial. What we are dealing with is a door, and the door is in you.

You were called by name before any of this

Let me put the strongest thing down first, because it goes straight at the door.

You have already been named. The thing you have been waiting nine seconds for has already been said over you, by Somebody who is not withholding it and never has been: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

But now thus says the Lord that created you, O Jacob, and He that formed you, O Israel, Fear not: for I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name; you are Mine.Isaiah 43:1

Take the three clauses in order, because they are the exact three things a person waits at a door for.

I have redeemed you. Bought back, deliberately, at cost. Somebody decided you were worth the outlay.

I have called you by your name. Not by your usefulness, not by your record, not by the category you fall into. Your name, which is the most personal thing anybody can say to you and the thing your father has never quite managed.

You are Mine. Belonging, stated flatly, as a fact rather than as a reward.

And notice who is speaking: the One who created and formed you. There is nobody further upstream. The approval you have been waiting for from a man of eighty was already issued by the One who made both of you. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

So the door you are standing at has already opened somewhere else, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own encouragement, and God's Spirit is not waiting for your father to speak before He speaks.

Honor is not the same as permission

Now let me be careful, because you are a man who honors his father and I am not going to ask you to stop.

Honor is real and it is commanded and it is beautiful, and everything you do for that man is right: ringing him, visiting, sitting with him, taking his advice seriously, letting him tell the story about the shifts.

Permission is a different transaction, and you have been running the second one while calling it the first.

Here is how you tell them apart. Honor gives. Permission asks. Honor can be offered to a man who says nothing at all in reply, and it is complete in the giving. Permission requires a specific response and is not complete until it arrives, and if it never arrives the person waiting stays a child in one particular room of their life while being fully grown in every other.

That is what has happened to you. Everything else in your life is a man's. That one room is a boy's.

And here is the piece that will free you if you let it: your father cannot open that door. Not because he will not. Because he does not know it is there, and because a human being was never able to issue the thing you are waiting for. What you have been asking of a quiet man of eighty is something only God has ever been in a position to say.

Hear this: you are called by name and you belong, and that was settled before either of you was born. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can walk into an appointment carrying rather than something you nod at.

And the practical half, plainly, because a message without it has failed you. If this has a grip on you, real help exists and none of it is small faith. A counselor is exactly the right tool for something forty-one years old and it is not disloyal to your father. And say one true sentence to your wife in daylight, because she has watched you make that call from car parks for years and has never been invited into what it is.