Teaching the Boy Anyway

It happened at somebody else's boat and he has not been able to put it down since.

His son was down on the end of the dock with a man from three houses along, a decent enough man, and the man was showing him how to tie the knot. The one his own father taught him at that age, on that water, with the same bad joke about the rabbit.

The boy was concentrating. That is what got him. His face was doing exactly what his own face used to do.

He did not say anything. He got the cooler out of the truck and he was pleasant to everybody and he drove home, and somewhere around the second bridge he understood what he had watched.

The boy had asked somebody else because his father had stopped teaching him.

He could not tell you when that started. There was no decision. What there is, and has been for a few years, is a voice that arrives at exactly the moment he is about to show the boy something, and the voice asks what the point is. Not cruelly. Almost reasonably. What is the point of teaching him this.

And he does not answer it, he just does not start, and then the moment goes, and there have been an enormous number of those moments.

He is thirty eight. His father taught him every single thing he knows how to do with his hands.

Sit down. There is a psalm that puts a man's grandchildren in front of him, and it is worth hearing tonight.

May you see your children's children

Here it is, and it is the last line of a short psalm about ordinary life.

May you see your children's children! Peace be upon Israel!Psalm 128:6

Look at what the psalm has been describing up to that point. Work that feeds a household. A wife. Children round a table. Nothing remarkable, nothing dramatic, no crisis and no rescue, just the ordinary furniture of a life lived over decades.

And then the blessing at the end is not a rescue either. It is: may you go on long enough to see the next generation, and the one after.

That is what God is prepared to pronounce over a man. Not that he will be extracted from all this, but that he will get to watch it continue.

You are inside a blessing about handing things on. Psalm 128:6 puts a man's grandchildren at the end of the good life it describes, and the Spirit inspired that as the crown of a psalm about work and a table.

What the voice actually is

Now the voice, because it needs identifying rather than obeying.

It arrives at one very specific moment, which is the moment before a transfer. Not during the work itself. Right before something gets handed to the boy. That is the tell, and it is worth noticing, because a thing that only shows up at one particular join is not a general philosophy. It is aimed.

And it does not argue. It asks a question, which is cleverer, because a question does not have to be true to work. It only has to be left unanswered for about four seconds, which is how long it takes for a moment to pass.

So answer it out loud once and it loses most of what it has. The point of teaching him is that he is my son and this is mine to give him.

And say it in a full voice rather than in your head, because a question asked internally can only be answered internally, and internal answers are exactly what this thing has been beating for several years. It has never once had to survive being contradicted out loud in a truck.

You are not being sensible by not starting. Nothing written anywhere makes a father withholding what he knows a form of wisdom, and the Spirit is not the origin of a question that arrives at exactly the moment before something gets handed over.

What your father did not know

Here is the thing that will be worth the most, and it is about the man who taught you.

Your father did not know how long he had either. Nobody does and he did not, and he taught you every single thing anyway, over years, in small pieces, most of which he probably never thought about again.

He was not operating on a calculation. He was doing what a father does, which is to put into a boy the things a man needs, without any information about how much of it will be used or when.

The transfer was never conditional on knowing the future. It never has been for anybody.

And think about what he actually handed you, because it was not a set of techniques. A boy who is taught to tie a knot by his father learns the knot, and he also learns that he is worth being taught, and that his father has time, and that the two of them are the sort of people who do this. The knot is the smaller half of it. That is why the dock mattered so much on Saturday and why you could not put it down at the second bridge.

You have something to give whether or not you can see the far end. What is written blesses a man with seeing his children's children, and the Spirit is not asking anybody for a forecast before they teach a nine year old to tie a knot.

And the boy asked somebody else, which is not a catastrophe and is information. He is still asking. That window is open.

And it will not stay open indefinitely, which is worth knowing without being frightened by it. A boy asks his father things until he concludes that his father does not answer, and then he stops asking and starts asking other people, and after that he stops asking anybody and works it out himself. You are still at the first stage, and Psalm 128:6 puts the handing on right at the center of what God blesses in an ordinary man, and the Spirit is not the one who has been standing in that gap.