He Is In The Ditch I Climbed Out Of

He knows what it looks like from the inside, and that is the whole of the trouble.

Another man watching his son right now would be worried in a general way. He is not worried in a general way. He can name what is happening because he has been in that exact place, and he knows which excuses come next and roughly in what order, and he knows what the mornings are like and what the man in that ditch tells himself at four in the afternoon.

He came out of it. That is a real thing and it took a long time and there are people who helped and there is a stretch of years he does not talk about.

And now his boy is twenty six and it is happening again in the next generation, in the same county, using some of the same words.

And underneath it, running all day, every day, is a sentence he has never said to another living soul: this is my doing. He was in that ditch when the boy was small. The boy saw things. And whatever anybody tells him about how these things run in families, he knows what a small child in that house saw, and he cannot get the arithmetic to come out any other way.

And a man at church, who has been faithful to him for years and who knows some of the story, said: have you fasted for that boy?

He said he had. Twice. And what he did not say, standing in a car park with his keys in his hand, is that both times what he was really doing was trying to pay something back.

If you can see it coming because you have been there, come and sit on the porch here a while.

The arithmetic is not going to come out

Let us take that first, because it is what is running under everything else.

That sum you keep doing does not have an answer and it was never going to. There is no honest way to calculate how much of a grown man's road belongs to what he saw at six, and the trying to is a thing that eats a father from the inside without ever producing a number.

Nobody here is going to say that what happened did not matter. It mattered. No man in that position needs telling otherwise and none of them is asking to be.

What can be said is that the calculating is not repentance and it is not love and it is not helping the boy. It is a man serving a sentence in a court that never sat.

You are not on trial, and there is no verdict pending on you anywhere. That is not a soft word offered to a man on a porch. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been with you through the whole of that story, both ends of it, and He is not conducting the arithmetic you have been running.

Who did the bringing up out of it

There is a verse written by a man who had been in a pit, and it is worth reading for who does the verbs.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Four verbs. Brought up. Set. Established. Every one of them belongs to God, and the man in the pit is the object of the sentence throughout.

Now think about your own years. You would tell it as a story with a lot of hard work in it and some people who helped, and that is true, and it is not the version the psalm gives. The psalm gives the credit somewhere else entirely, and the man writing it had done plenty of climbing.

If that is who brought you up, then that is who is available to your son, and the getting out was never something a person generated in themselves for a later generation to inherit.

You did not climb out on your own, and he does not have to either. I am not saying that to flatten a hard history: it is what the psalm puts in God's hands and how many of the verbs it gives Him (Psalm 40:2), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes that something a father can stand on in a car park.

And going without does not pay anything back

Here is a thing that needs saying flat out, because of what you did not tell that man.

You cannot pay it back. Not with going without food and not with anything else, and the reason is not that the price is too high. It is that there is no account open. God is not holding a debt against a man for the years he was in the ditch, and He is not running a scheme where a father can buy a son out of one.

You are not being invoiced, and there is nothing outstanding from you. Scripture says as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us (Psalm 103:12), and it is His Spirit who makes that a fact about the years you do not talk about rather than a verse you have heard preached.

And going without food does not build a wall around a young man either. It is not a covering and it does not keep him, and if it were, then every night you slept would be a night he was unguarded, which is a load no father should carry and God has never handed out.

Now the sentence this site says everywhere. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing off you. Diabetes, medication, any hard road with eating, being underweight, unwell, older or simply not sure: talk to your doctor and let what they say be the answer. You are not one step further from God on account of a doctor's advice. The word says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to a man because of his body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself or for him, put this down and call a real person: your doctor, his doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if either of you is in danger tonight. That is not going around God. That is help He put in this world on purpose.