What My Son Decides

He is twenty-four and he has to decide by the end of the month, and it is a real decision with real consequences, and it will shape the next fifteen years of his life whichever way it goes.

His father is fifty-six and has one job left in this, which is not to ruin it.

He knows that. He has known it since about April. He has watched other men his age do the other thing and he has seen the faces on the sons afterwards, that specific closed face, and he swore to himself years ago that he would not be a man who produced that face.

And yet.

He has caught himself, four separate times this month, doing something he is not proud of.

Once it was a story about a cousin, told at the table, that was true and that he chose deliberately.

Once it was a sigh at the wrong moment, which he heard himself do and could not take back.

Once it was arranging for a particular uncle to be at a particular meal, which is a thing he would deny if you accused him of it and which he did entirely on purpose.

And once it was a prayer, and that is the one that has kept him up, because he listened to himself praying and realized that what he was actually doing was looking for the handle. Trying to find the words that would work. Treating God as one more lever in a system that ends with his son choosing correctly.

And he sat there on the roof afterwards, ashamed, and thought: I want to trust You with him. I do not know how to want something this much and hold it loosely at the same time.

And you know that exactly, because there is a person you love whose life you have been quietly trying to steer through God.

Trusting a Father with somebody you love

Let us settle what governs this whole page. Nothing on it is being asked of you, there is no appeal at the bottom of it, and there are no steps in it anywhere.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. Follow the verb in the famous sentence and it lands on Him. He is under examination. He is the one who offered to be found out. It is written, put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts (Malachi 3:10), and the Holy Spirit is what turns a famous sentence into an invitation addressed to you.

Here it is, in its own room:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Said to a nation, in one decade, about one building, where the store room had emptied and the families who worked there had gone home hungry. It is a sentence about people eating, and what is remarkable about it, once you see it, is that God is speaking there exactly the way a father speaks: come and find out whether I am who you have decided I am.

Now the handle, because that is the honest subject of this page and it is not a small thing.

A mechanism is not evil. A mechanism is safe. If a thing runs by operation then it is predictable, and if it is predictable then it is in your hands, and a man who loves his son very much would give a great deal for it to be in his hands.

But there is a price on that arrangement and you already know what it is, because you have been paying it since April. If it is in your hands, then everything that happens is yours, and the weight of a fifteen-year decision is not a weight a man can carry on his own chest.

You are dealing with a Father, and a Father is not predictable in the way a mechanism is, He is trustworthy, which is a different property altogether. Jesus made that comparison out of ordinary family life: which of you, if his son asks for a fish, will give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion (Luke 11:11). If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give. There is no handle anywhere in that. There is a child asking and a Father who is not that kind of person. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that off a page and sets it on a roof at midnight.

Now the harder part, and it needs saying plainly to a man who loves his son.

God will not be used as leverage on another person, and the fact that He will not is the best news in this house. He does not override anybody's will, and He did not override yours. It is written that He stands at the door and knocks (Revelation 3:20), which is an astonishing sentence about the God who made the door. If He would use force on your son at your request, He would have used it on you first, and you would not be the man you are. The Holy Spirit is the One who works in a grown son without being operated by anybody, including his father.

So there is one thing this page will not do, and it will not do it however lovingly it could be worded. Nothing here is going to teach you how to pray so that your son decides correctly. That is the handle, and it is exactly what you heard yourself reaching for, and you were right to be uneasy about it.

Here is what you can do instead, and it is not smaller.

You can hand him over, and God has never once received somebody handed to Him and thought less of the one who let go. It is written that your Father knows what you need before you ask Him (Matthew 6:8), and that casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7), and notice who the caring is aimed at in that second sentence. It is aimed at you. Not at the outcome. At the man on the roof. His Spirit is the one who makes that read like a hand on a shoulder rather than a piece of advice.

And the love in you is not the problem, so nobody here is going to ask you to want it less.

You are allowed to want this enormously and to hold it loosely, and those two things are not in competition. It is written that we have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, Abba, Father (Romans 8:15). A man who says Abba is not a man who has stopped caring. He is a man who has remembered whose son he is himself.

And one last thing.

If you find this hard, you are not failing at it. Handing over somebody you love is the hardest thing on this site by a distance, and finding it difficult is not evidence about your faith. It is evidence that you love him.