The House My Father Would Have Liked

There was a porch on the back of it, and the boards ran the wrong way, and you noticed that inside the first ten seconds because of who taught you to notice it.

You stood there while the agent talked about the roof and you were not listening to a word of it. You were thinking that your father would have walked the length of that porch twice, slowly, and stopped at the far post, and put his hand flat on it, and said nothing at all for about twenty seconds, and then said: well now.

That is what he said. About good work. Two words and then he would move on and you would be walking about a foot taller for the rest of the day.

You did not tell your wife any of that in the car on the way home. You said the porch was solid.

And then the call came and it went to a family with a bigger down payment, and what you said was that these things happen, and you went and did something in the shop for a couple of hours.

He has been gone nineteen months. You have not cried about him since the second week, and you have not cried about the house at all, and somewhere in you those two facts are the same fact and you have no idea what to do with that.

Two losses, stacked

I have watched this happen to enough men to tell you what I think is going on, and it will sound simple until you try it.

You lost two things and have been treating them as one.

The first is a house with a porch on the back of it, and that is a real loss with a real size, and it is on the smaller end as losses go, and nobody would argue with you about that. The second is your father, and that one has no size at all.

And what happened last Thursday is that the second one came up through the first one, the way water comes up through a floor, because the house was the last place you had built a picture of him standing.

You are grieving a man and a building at the same moment, and one loss arriving through another has never once meant you were making too much of the smaller one. Lamentations 3 keeps a whole book for a grief that will not stay filed, and the Holy Spirit is the one out in a shop with a man at four in the afternoon.

Here is why that matters practically. When two griefs are stacked, a man does the arithmetic and decides the whole pile is out of proportion. He looks at how much he feels, compares it to a house he never owned, concludes he is being ridiculous, and puts all of it away. Both of them. Together.

And the one that gets buried is not the small one.

You have not been dwelling on anything, and needing to feel the size of your own father has never once been self indulgence. It is written in Lamentations that the soul has them still in remembrance and is humbled in him, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a man company while he stops doing the arithmetic.

The book that does not move on

Here is the line, and I want you to notice what the writer does not do with it.

My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. (Lamentations 3:20, King James Version)

Still in remembrance.

The man writing that has been through the worst thing he has ever seen. And three verses later he says something famous and hopeful about mercies being new every morning, and every preacher anybody ever heard quotes that part.

But look at where he is standing when he says it. He has not stopped remembering. He has not been cured of it. The remembering is still going on inside the same chest that says the hopeful thing, and he does not treat that as a contradiction or as a failure of faith.

That is scripture refusing to make a man choose between carrying something and walking forward.

You are able to hold a thing you have not finished carrying and still go to work in the morning, and remembering has never once been the same as being stuck. Lamentations 3 keeps the remembrance in the same paragraph as the mercy, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding both of those steady in a man at once.

And notice the honesty of the word humbled. Not comforted. Not resolved. Humbled, which is what grief actually does to a man: it takes him down to his real size and leaves him there a while.

You have been brought low by something that genuinely is large, and being brought low has never once been the same as being weak. The written word puts the remembrance and the humbling in one sentence and moves to mercy without erasing either, and the Spirit of God is doing that work in you rather than asking you to do it yourself.