Not in Front of My Boys

He has two sons, nineteen and sixteen, and he has not come apart in front of either of them in their entire lives.

That is not bravado. He would tell you the whole thing straight if you sat with him long enough. When his own father died the older boy was eleven, and he went out and split wood for two hours in the dark and came back in and made supper. When the diagnosis came and then went away again, he told them in the kitchen in about four sentences and then asked about school.

He has thought hard about whether that was right. He has landed, mostly, on yes. Their world stayed steady and there was a reason for that and the reason was him.

Now here is the thing nobody knows, which he has carried for about nine years.

He wants to be filled with the Holy Spirit. He has wanted it since a man he respected talked about it on a job site, plainly, without any theater in it, and something in him has been reaching for it ever since.

And he will not ask anywhere either of those boys could walk in.

Not the house. Not the porch, because the porch is visible from the drive. Not the shop, because the sixteen year old comes and goes out there without knocking. He has considered the truck and then thought about how it would look if somebody came round the corner, and then he has let the whole thing go, again, for the ninth year running.

The sentence, which he could not say to anyone: if they see their father come apart, something gets taken off them and I do not get to put it back.

You may know that calculation. The person you would not risk it in front of.

The verse ends where his fear is

There is a short line in a psalm that has his exact worry in the second half of it, and most people quote only the first.

They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.Psalm 34:5

Everybody remembers the looking and the lightening. Read what David bothers to add. Their faces were not ashamed.

That is a strange thing to include unless somebody was worried about it. He is describing people who turned toward God, and the thing he wants on the record is what did not happen to their faces afterward. No exposure. No humiliation. Nothing they would have to live down in front of anybody who was watching.

You are being handed the exact thing you have been guarding, and Psalm 34:5 puts faces that were not ashamed in the same sentence as the looking, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a line from a psalm written by a man who had once pretended to be mad to save his life and lands it on a father in a truck.

And it is worth knowing where David wrote that from. He had recently escaped a foreign king by drooling into his own beard in front of a court. He knew exactly what an undignified scene costs a man, and this is the psalm he wrote afterward.

God is not short of ways to fill a man quietly

Consider what is actually required for this, because he has never been told and has assumed the worst.

Nothing is required. No posture, no volume, no location, no witness. Every account of somebody being filled that involves a crowd also happened to include a crowd for other reasons, and there is no verse anywhere that names an audience as part of the mechanism.

Which means his whole nine year problem is a problem he inherited from other people's stories rather than from anything God has said.

You have been solving a problem the text never set you, because the written word requires nothing visible of anybody and never once makes a scene part of the transaction, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from an argument into a door in the side of a truck.

And notice what the psalm says the looking produces. Lightened. Made bright. That is a word about a face changing in the good direction, which is the opposite of what he has been bracing for.

You are being offered a face that lifts and not one that gets exposed, and Psalm 34 pairs the lightening and the absence of shame in a single breath, and the same Spirit who moved a hunted man to write it moves in a field at the end of a day.

Guarding them was not wrong

Now the part he needs said plainly, because he has half wondered for nine years whether his caution about the boys is faith or cowardice.

It is neither. It is fatherhood. A man who kept two children steady through a grandfather's death and a diagnosis did something real and it cost him, and the fact that he split wood in the dark rather than in the kitchen is not a spiritual defect. It is a decision a lot of good fathers have made.

Nothing here asks him to reverse it. The boys do not need to see anything. That was never the condition.

You were never required to perform anything in front of your sons, because Psalm 34:5 attaches the whole thing to a man looking toward God and to nothing else at all, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief rather than a challenge to a careful father.