His Father Asked Him Who He Was Again

He asked twice this morning. Once before the tablets and once about half past nine, and the second time he asked it in a friendly way, the way you ask a nurse.

"And what is your name, son?"

Son. He still says son. Which is either a word he has kept or a word he says to everybody now, and the difference matters enormously and there is no way to find out.

Two years since the diagnosis. Longer than that in reality.

The chair is by the window because the light is better and because there is a thing about the window in the afternoon that settles him, and nobody knows why, and the occupational therapist said take what works.

He is fifty six. He has moved back in. His own house is let and he does not talk about that.

And for two years he has said the same thing over this house. God is good. He said it in the first week and he said it to his sister on the phone and he has said it in that room with the door open more times than he could count, and he has meant it every single time.

This morning he said it after the second asking, standing in the hall, out of the room, the way you do.

And it cost him something.

Not doubt. That is the thing he cannot explain to anybody and has not tried. It was not that he stopped believing it. It was that the sentence went through him on the way out, and took something with it, and he stood in the hall afterwards holding the doorframe.

If you have said a true thing about God and felt it charge you for the crossing, you know that hall. And you know that there is nobody to tell, because the only accurate way to describe it sounds like unbelief and it is not.

The word, and the psalm that says it plainly

Let me stand in the hall with you for a minute and be precise, because you are a precise man and the imprecision is part of what is hurting.

The problem is not the disease. You have read about the disease and you know its shape and you have made your peace with what it takes and in what order. The problem is that a true sentence has started costing you to say, and you have no category for that, and the only words available to describe it are words that sound like losing your faith, which is not what is happening.

So let me give you the word first, plainly.

Blessed does not mean the house is well. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is a fact about where He is looking. It does not read off a diagnosis and it never has.

Now the psalm, and this is the one written by a man who nearly went under.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

Read the first clause and notice that it is in the present tense, and notice that he wrote it down.

My flesh and my heart faileth. Not: failed, once, and then I got through it. Faileth. It is happening while he writes.

And Psalm 73 is the psalm where a man says, near the start, that his feet had almost gone from under him, and that he was envious at the prosperity of the wicked, and that when he tried to think it through it was too painful for him. He says all of that in Scripture, in the first person, without softening.

You are inside a psalm written by a man whose heart was failing while he wrote it, and he did not wait until afterwards to write it. Psalm 73:26 puts the failing in the present tense and God in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to hand a man in a hallway a verse written by somebody who was also still in it.

What it costs to say a true thing

Now the thing that happened in the hall, because it deserves a name and nobody has given you one.

Saying a true thing about God while looking at something that appears to contradict it is work. Actual work. It costs something in a person, every time, and the cost is not doubt and it is not weakness. It is the price of holding two things that do not fit in the same hand.

Job does it. Habakkuk does it and you can hear the effort in the grammar. And this psalmist does it in the same verse, in the same breath, and the whole verse is built out of the strain: my flesh and my heart faileth, BUT God is the strength of my heart.

That word but is doing enormous work and it is the most expensive word in the psalm.

You have been doing costly work in a hallway for two years and calling it nothing, and Scripture builds a whole verse out of the same effort. Psalm 73:26 sets the failing and the strength against each other with a conjunction rather than resolving one into the other, and it is the Holy Spirit who Paul says helps our weakness, which is a word for taking hold of the other end of a weight.

And here is what the psalm gives you at the end of the strain, which is the part that will help in the hall.

God is the strength of my heart. My heart is the thing that is failing, and God is named as the strength of that exact thing. Not a replacement for it. Not a distraction from it. The strength of the failing organ, named directly.

You have God named as the strength of the precise thing in you that is giving way. The written word puts the strength and the failing on the same noun, and it is His Spirit who is described as strengthening with might in the inner man, which is the same location.

About son, and about what I will not say

Now the word son, because you have been turning it over for weeks and you should not have to do that alone.

You will not find out. There is no test and there is no moment where he tells you, and you may spend years not knowing whether that word is you or whether it is a habit that outlasted the knowing.

So here is what I would say about it, and it is not a comfort, it is a fact. Every time he says son, whether he means you or not, you are the one it lands on. The word is doing its work in the room whatever is behind it, and you have been receiving something real for two years and disqualifying it because you cannot verify the source.

And I am not going to tell you he comes back. He may have moments and he may not and I do not know and neither does anybody who has told you otherwise.

And I am not going to tell you this is making you into something. It is taking things out of you. That is what it does. God is not the author of what is happening to your father's brain and nobody arranged it for your development.

You are favored and your father asked your name twice this morning, and neither of those is evidence about the other. Scripture keeps the failing and the portion in one verse without resolving the tension, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to hold both without needing one of them to be less true.

And you are fifty six and you have let your own house and you do not talk about it. Talk about it to somebody. A carers' service, your own doctor, the sister you ring. That is not disloyalty to him. It is maintenance on the only person doing this job.