It Is Not Me, It Is My Son

Someone asked him how he was, and he answered with his son's numbers.

He did not notice he had done it. He gave the figures the way another man might give the football score, quickly, fluently, with the small correction of a father who tracks these things daily. Then he heard himself, and stopped, and said sorry, and the person who had asked said no, no, of course, and asked a follow up question about the boy, which he was able to answer, and the moment passed, and neither of them ever came back to the original question.

Eleven months, and nobody has asked him about him twice.

He is the one who reads the letters first. He is the one who learned the vocabulary in a weekend, who knows what the ranges mean and which number matters and what the next appointment is deciding. He drives, he waits, he parks in the same corner of the same level. He has a bag by the door that never gets unpacked. And at two in the morning he stands in the doorway of his son's room, not going in, one hand on the frame, watching the shape under the blanket rise and fall, and he does the only thing he has left, which is to count breaths.

And you are not standing in a doorway watching a football score. You are standing in a doorway watching your whole heart breathe. You have a name and an age and a diagnosis in your mouth every day, and none of them are yours, and if someone asked you tonight how you are, you would answer with them, because you honestly do not have another answer left.

The one nobody has asked about

I want to begin somewhere you might not expect, and I hope you will let me.

Not with your child. With you.

You have vanished. Not dramatically, not all at once. It happened by increments, in waiting rooms, and it happened because you chose it every time, which is exactly what love does. But it has happened. You do not have hobbies anymore, you have gaps. Your friendships have quietly become updates. You eat standing up. You have stopped mentioning your own back, your own headaches, your own sleep, because it feels obscene to bring up something so small next to something so large. And when someone does turn and ask about you directly, you feel the strangest thing, which is not relief. It is embarrassment, and then a lump in your throat you have to swallow fast, because if you started you might not stop.

There is guilt in here too, and I am going to say it out loud so you do not have to. You have had thoughts you would never repeat. You have been so tired that you resented the day. You have wondered, in a bad hour, what your life would have looked like otherwise, and then you have hated yourself for the thought before it had even finished. Listen to me. That thought is not a betrayal of your child. It is the sound of a human being under a weight that was never designed for one person, and it is not held against you anywhere in heaven. That is not my kindness talking. He remembers that we are dust, Psalm 103:14 puts it exactly that plainly, and His Spirit reads a tired parent's worst hour for what it actually is.

Now let me take you to a man who did exactly what you are doing, in front of a crowd.

My little daughter lieth at the point of death: I pray thee, come and lay thy hands on her, that she may be healed; and she shall live.Mark 5:23

Look at who is speaking. A synagogue ruler. A man with standing, a man with a seat, a man who was used to being the one others came to for help, and there he is on his face in the road in front of a traveling teacher, in the dust, in public, with no composure left at all.

And notice what he says. He does not say I need. He says my daughter. Every word out of his mouth is about her. He has been absorbed entirely into the emergency of someone else's body, and he has come with no argument, no credentials and no plan, only a location and a request.

And the very next thing in the story is the thing I want you to have tonight. Jesus went with him.

No interview. No assessment of whether the father had it right. He simply turned and walked with him toward the house, which means that from that moment the man was not walking home alone anymore, and everything that happened after that happened with Jesus already on the road beside him.

You should know that the walk was not easy. He was interrupted on the way by someone else's need, and then messengers came out to meet him with the worst sentence a parent can be handed. And Jesus turned to the father, not to the crowd and not yet to the child, and spoke directly to him: do not be afraid, only believe. Right there in the middle of the road. The father was ministered to on the way, before anything had resolved.

That is the pattern I want you to see, and it is not a formula and I am not going to pretend to you that it is. I will not stand here and tell you what is going to happen in your house, because I do not know, and anyone who tells you they do is selling you something I want no part of. What I know is what that road shows: a parent may come with nothing but a location and a request, God takes the request seriously, and the parent is not overlooked while the child is being carried.

And when it was over, in a room where something had just happened that nobody could explain, he told them to give her something to eat.

Something to eat. That is the God we are dealing with. In the middle of the greatest moment of that family's life, he noticed that a child was hungry and that her parents were too stunned to think of it. He does not only see the crisis. He sees the sandwich. He sees you eating standing up in a corridor.