What He Taught His Sons

The bleachers are aluminum and they have been in the sun since noon, so he is sitting on his cap.

Bottom of the fourth. A chain link backstop with a strip of green fabric woven through it, a cooler at the end of the row, somebody's scorebook, a paper cone of shaved ice going soft in his hand because he is holding it for the boy. His grandson is eight and plays second base and is not good yet, and the whole reason to be here at four on a Saturday is that not good yet is a wonderful thing to watch.

The kid strikes out looking. Third strike, low and outside, and even the parents groan at the call. And he comes back around the fence with his face going, the way an eight year old's face goes when he is holding it and losing.

And his father meets him at the gate. Forty years old, sunglasses up on his head, a good man. He crouches down to the boy's level, which is more than a lot of men do, and he puts a hand on his shoulder, and he says: hey. Hey. We do not do that. You handle it.

The grandfather is nine feet away with a paper cone of shaved ice in his hand.

Because that is his. That sentence is his. Word for word, tone for tone, out of a driveway in 1994 with a bike on its side and a boy of nine holding his elbow, and he had said it because it was said to him, on a dock, by a man who is dead now. And here it is again, in the sun, at a ball field, going into the third one down.

Fourteen months ago, at sixty, something happened to him he still does not have good words for. He came in late. Last spring. And what nobody tells you about coming in at sixty is that the first thing you can see clearly is the road behind you, and it is longer than you thought, and it has your sons on it.

The boy takes the shaved ice from him without a word and sits down two feet away, wiping his face with his wrist. The game goes on. The metal ping of an aluminum bat somewhere.

You know the bleacher. Yours might be a phrase your daughter uses on her own children in a voice you recognize, or the way your son goes quiet in exactly the way you went quiet. And you know the arithmetic that runs underneath the gladness, which is thirty years times three people, and no way at all to go back and take it off them.

He knew what He was making

Sit here through the rest of the inning with me, because there is a psalm for exactly this bleacher and I want to read it slowly.

David is old when he writes 103. He has a road behind him too, and there are people on it, and some of what he did landed on his own house and stayed there. And in the middle of a psalm about mercy he puts down the reason for the mercy, and the reason is not what people expect.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:13-14

He knows our frame. He remembers we are dust. That is not a compliment and it is not an insult. It is a maker's knowledge of the material, and it means He was never working from a wrong estimate of you. He knew, on every one of those thirty years, exactly what a man without Him teaches his sons, because He knew what the man was made of.

You are pitied by a Father who knew your frame the whole time, and not one of those thirty years reached Him as news. That is Psalm 103, and it is the Spirit who takes a psalm written by an old man with a hard house and lays it across an aluminum bleacher in the fourth inning.

And read what the same psalm does with the record.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:12

East and west, not north and south. North and south have a pole in each of them where the direction runs out and reverses. East and west never meet and never run out. He picked the axis with no end on it.

You have a record that has been carried off in the one direction that has no end to it, and that was His doing and not your arithmetic. It is written in the same psalm as the pity, and it is His Spirit who applies a removal like that to a specific man in a specific row of seats.

I am not going to hurry you off this

Now I have to be careful, because there is a thing men do to a grieving man with a Bible in their hand, and I will not do it to you.

The ache in that bleacher is real. It is not self pity and it is not unbelief and it is not a failure to accept anything. It is the exact and appropriate weight of seeing clearly what a man did not see for thirty years, and Scripture never once hurries a man off it. David sat in the ashes over his own house. He was not told it was nothing.

So I am not here to talk you out of the sorrow, and I will not tell you it was all for the best, because it was not, and you would stop believing me and you would be right to.

You are allowed to grieve this in front of Him, and the word of God has room in it for a man doing exactly that. The psalms are full of men bringing Him the wreckage without dressing it up first, and it is the Spirit who carries a sorrow like that up rather than filtering it at the door.

What I will say is what the sorrow is. It is love arriving late and finding the room already furnished. It is not punishment. It is not the bill for the thirty years. And it is not evidence about you in either direction, so do not go looking in it for a verdict, because it does not hold one.

Two things that are not yours, and one that is

Here is the part that will actually let you sleep, and it is three sentences long.

The first thing that is not yours is the verdict on your sons. Ezekiel had to say this to a whole nation that was passing blame down the family line like a plate.

The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.Ezekiel 18:20

Your sons are grown men and God deals with them Himself. That is not a way of letting you off. It is a fact about how He works, and it means the door to your son is not routed through you and never was. He has a Father available to him in His own right, today, at forty, at the gate of a ball field.

You have a God who goes directly to a grown man without needing his father's permission or his father's example. Ezekiel 18 puts it in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a family line, who does the work of getting into a forty year old.

The second thing that is not yours is the outcome. And I want to say this plainly, because it is where people like me start lying to people like you. I am not going to tell you that God will make your last years unusually fruitful to make up for the first sixty. I am not going to tell you your grandsons will turn out a certain way because you came in late. Nobody on earth can tell you that, God has not published it, and a promise like that would be a comfort with a hole in it that opens the first hard year.

You were never asked to buy the years back, and Scripture never once put that on a man. The word puts the redeeming in His hands, and it is His Spirit who does it, in His own way, on a timetable He has not shown to anybody.

And the one thing that is yours is small enough to be real. It is the next sentence you say to that boy. That is not a consolation prize. It is the actual currency of a grandfather, and it always was, and you have a supply of it starting this afternoon.