Home By Six For Twelve Years

Twice. The first time you were thirty-three and the second time you were thirty-eight, and the second one they came back and asked again in the November and you said no a second time and that was that.

Nobody ever asks again after the second no. You knew that when you said it.

What it meant, practically, was that you have been home by six for twelve years. Not most nights. Every night, apart from the two weeks in the summer and the odd Thursday, and your children have never in their whole lives had a father who was not there at six o'clock.

You do not regret it. You want that on the record before anything else, because people hear this kind of thing and assume regret, and there is none.

But something happened about eight months ago that you have not been able to put down.

Your eldest is nineteen now and she said something at the table, perfectly casually, about a friend's father, and about how that man had built something, and there was nothing in it and she meant nothing by it, and you laughed and said something and passed the bread.

And you went out to the car afterwards for something you did not need and stood there for about four minutes.

Because you realized, standing by the car, that in twelve years you have never once been able to name what you got. You can name what you turned down, precisely, twice, with dates. And when the question comes the other way round, you find that all you have is the word home, which is a place and not an achievement, and you cannot make a sentence out of it.

The last sentence in the Old Testament is about this

There is a promise at the very end of Malachi, and it is the last thing God says before four hundred years of silence, which is a remarkable place to put a sentence about fathers and children.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers.Malachi 4:6

Read what is being described as the great work.

Not a temple. Not a kingdom. Not a name that lasts. The turning of a heart toward a child and a child's heart back again, and God puts it at the end of the whole book as the thing the coming one will do.

Now hold that up against a car park and four minutes.

You have been calling it home because you have not had a word for it, and the word you have not had is the one God chose to end an entire testament on. What you have been doing at six o'clock every night for twelve years is not the absence of a career. It is the specific work named in the last line before the silence.

You are doing the thing the written word calls the turning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that kitchen at six o'clock, and twelve years of nobody naming it does not make it unnamed. It only makes it unsaid.

Nobody will ever hand you this one

Now let me be honest about why nobody has told you, because you deserve to know that it is not a comment on the value of what you did.

Nobody hands out this particular sentence, ever, to anybody.

A man who builds something gets told. There is a moment, a photograph, a thing with his name on it, and people say it to his face at a dinner. The mechanism exists.

There is no mechanism for a man being home at six. There is no evening on which anybody stands up and says that the reason this nineteen year old can hold a conversation with an adult without flinching is twelve years of a particular car pulling in at ten to.

Your daughter will not tell you, either. Not because she does not know. Because she does not know that she knows, and she will not find out until she is about thirty-four, and she will probably tell somebody else about it before she tells you.

So you have to say it yourself, which is harder and which is what this whole page is for.

You have been set apart toward a work and it is written and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the turning, and twelve years of an unnamed thing does not become a wasted thing.

What was preached in a plain hall

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

Handed on carelessly, that teaching becomes a description of a man by what he does not do. And that is exactly the sentence you have about yourself: a man who turned two things down. Twelve years of a life, summarized as a pair of refusals. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

The hall did not work that way, because the hall had work for people to do the same week they arrived, and the people in it were named by what they had been sent to. Set apart there meant sent, and everybody knew where.

The written word ends its whole first testament on the turning of hearts, and the Holy Spirit has been at that turning in your kitchen for twelve years, and a life is not summarized by two refusals in an office.