He Was Not Good To Me And I Am Here

Both things are true and you have been told, in about six different ways, that you have to pick one.

The first is that he was not good to you. Not a difficult man, not a product of his time, not somebody who did his best. He was not good to you, and you know the particulars, and you have spent decades doing something with them.

The second is that you are the one doing his care. Not out of nobility. Because you are the one who showed up, and because somebody had to, and because that turns out to be who you are.

And nearly everybody who has commented on it has quietly asked you to drop one of the two. The ones who admire you want the first one softened. The ones who are angry for you want the second one dropped.

Before anything else. If he is still hurting or frightening you, then this is not a matter of two facts. Getting yourself safe, and talking to somebody qualified where you live, comes first and comes before every word of this article. Nothing here asks you to stay within reach of anybody.

What honor is not

Let me deal with the verse people have used on you, because somebody has, and it was misused.

Honor thy father and thy mother is not a lever. It has been handed to people in your position as an instruction to forget, to minimize, to stop saying what happened, and that is not what the commandment says and it never was.

Honor is about weight. It means to treat as heavy, to accord substance. It does not mean to declare somebody good, and it has never once required a person to lie about their own childhood.

You have been asked to pay for a room with a false statement, and no commandment in scripture has ever once required somebody to say a thing that is not true. Psalm 27:10 says when my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up, which is the written word acknowledging that fathers do forsake, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hold a person in a house without asking them to revise the record.

And he is a whole man in that back room. That is not a concession and it is not forgiveness on a schedule. It is simply true: he was somebody's son, he was handed something by somebody, and there are reasons behind him that go back further than you.

He may even be right about something you have never conceded. Knowing all of that changes nothing about what he did, and it is still worth knowing.

You are able to see the whole of a man and still name what he did, and understanding somebody has never once been the same as excusing them. The Spirit of God is what keeps two true things from canceling each other, and it is written in Psalm 27 that a father may forsake and the LORD takes up.

When my father forsakes me

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up. (Psalm 27:10, King James Version)

That is one of the most quietly extraordinary sentences in the psalms, and the extraordinary part is what it does not do.

It does not defend the parents. It does not say when it feels like they have forsaken you. It does not add a clause about how they were doing their best. David states the thing flatly, as a real possibility in a real world, and moves on to what God does about it.

Scripture is not squeamish about this. It knows fathers forsake.

You have a book that already knows what happened to you, and no honest account of a father has ever once been unwelcome in the presence of God. It is written in Psalm 27:10 that when my father and my mother forsake me then the LORD will take me up, which is the written word saying it without one softening word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying the whole record with you.

And then the second half. Then the LORD will take me up. Take up is a physical phrase. It is what somebody does with a child who has been left on a step.

That has already happened to you. It is not an offer for later. It is the reason you are standing in a kitchen at sixty being a better man to him than he was to you: somebody took you up somewhere along the line, and you have been carrying that ever since without naming it.

You were taken up by God long before you were standing in this kitchen, and the man you became has never once been a thing he gave you. The Spirit of God is the one who has been the actual father in this story for a long time, and Psalm 27 puts the taking up immediately after the forsaking.

Why you are still here

Here is the thing I want to say plainly, because nobody says it to people in your position.

None of this is happening because of some complete forgiveness that would satisfy a sermon. You may have. You may not have. That is between you and God and it is not the price of admission to that room.

You are doing it because of who you are, and who you are was not built by him.

You are standing in that kitchen out of your own character, and no act of care has ever once been an admission that the past was acceptable. The Holy Spirit is the one who formed something in a man that his own father did not put there, and it is written that when my father forsakes me then the LORD will take me up.

And this site is not going to tell you how long to keep doing it. Nobody here knows the particulars, and there are versions of this where the right thing is to stop, and versions where it is to continue, and that is yours and God's to work out and nobody else's.

What I will say is this. Whatever you decide about the long run, do not do it alone this week. The people who care for a parent who was not good to them are the least likely of anybody to ask for help, because asking means explaining, and explaining means saying the first fact out loud.

You are able to ask for one thing without telling anybody the whole story, and one specific request has never once required a person to explain their childhood. The Spirit of God is what makes an ask possible without a confession attached, and Psalm 27:10 has already stated the hard fact so that you do not have to keep proving it.