The Men In This Family Do Not Stay

Your grandfather went when your father was six.

Your father went when you were eleven, and he came back twice, and the second time was worse than the going.

And you are forty three, and you have two children, and you have never once left, and you still find yourself doing a thing you have never described to anybody. You check. Quietly, at certain moments, you check to see whether the thing has started yet.

That is what it is like to be the third man in a line like this. Not fear exactly. More like waiting for a diagnosis you were told about at eleven.

And nothing has happened. There is a house and a wife asleep upstairs and two children who are fine, and there is no crisis anywhere in this and there never has been.

There is a habit of checking, which started at about eleven years old in a house where a man had already gone, and which has run underneath thirty two years of an ordinary and reasonably happy life.

What the checking is for

Let me name the belief underneath the checking, because it is doing a great deal of work.

It is that leaving is a thing that happens to the men in your family rather than a thing they do. That it arrives, at some point, from outside, and that on the day it does a man finds out what he is made of and it turns out to be the same thing they were made of.

That belief was installed at eleven, by a house, without anybody saying a word.

You have been waiting for something to arrive rather than watching yourself decide, and no man in any family has ever once left without a series of choices in front of it. First Corinthians 10:13 says God is faithful, who will make a way to escape, which is the written word putting a door where you were told there was none, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an exit visible at the exact moment a man believes he has none.

And your father is a whole man in this, and I am not going to hand you a case against him. He was eleven once too, in a house where a man had gone, and nobody sat him down and explained a different way of being a father because nobody in that line had one to teach.

He is right about at least one thing you have never conceded to him. He also came back twice, which is not nothing, however badly it went.

You are able to end this without condemning either of them, and stopping a thing has never once required the men who handed it on to be found guilty. The Spirit of God is what makes an ending possible with nobody accused, and it is written in 1 Corinthians 10 that a way to escape is made.

A way to escape

There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. (1 Corinthians 10:13, King James Version)

Three things in that verse and every one of them lands on a man who is waiting for a diagnosis.

The first: such as is common to man. Whatever it is, it is not a special affliction attached to your surname. It is the ordinary human thing, which means it is not fate and it is not a family curse and it is not something running in a bloodline like a defect.

You are dealing with something common to men rather than something particular to your name, and no family history has ever once made an ordinary struggle into an inheritance. It is written in 1 Corinthians 10:13 that there hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man, which is the written word refusing to make this special, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a family legend apart without disrespecting anybody in it.

The second: He will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able. There is a ceiling, and it is set by somebody who knows what you can carry, and it is not set by what your father could carry.

And the third, which is the one to hold. He will with the temptation also make a way to escape.

Make. Not show. The way is manufactured, in the moment, by God, and the verse says it arrives with the thing rather than after it.

You have a door that is made rather than found, and no man has ever once been left in a room by God with the only exit being the one his father took. The Spirit of God is the one who builds a way out while a man is still standing in it, and 1 Corinthians 10 puts the escape and the temptation in the same sentence.

Naming it out loud

Here is the practical thing, and it is the whole of the assignment.

Say it out loud. One plain sentence, and then the second half.

In this family the men do not stay. And it stops here.

You are able to say a sentence nobody in three generations said out loud, and naming a thing has never once been the same as accusing the men it came through. The Holy Spirit is the one present when something is finally spoken in a kitchen, and it is written that God is faithful and will make a way to escape.

The reason this matters more than it sounds is that the pattern has been operating entirely without words. Nobody in your family has ever said the sentence. It is understood, and understood things are much harder to end than stated ones, because there is nothing to disagree with.

Say it out loud and it becomes a claim. A claim can be examined. A claim can be denied. An assumption cannot.

And say the second half properly, because that is where the work is. It stops here. Not: I hope it stops here. Not: I am trying to make sure it stops here. It stops here, said flat, by a man who is standing in his own kitchen at forty three having never once left.

You are able to say four words as a fact rather than as a hope, and a man who has stayed for forty three years has never once needed to hedge that sentence. The Spirit of God is what puts weight into a short sentence, and 1 Corinthians 10:13 has the way made and never merely offered.