Doing the Whole Thing Twice

The class group chat is the thing that gets him.

Not the early mornings. Not the packed lunch, which he has down to four minutes flat. The group chat, which has forty-one people in it, and a name with an emoji in it, and which goes off at ten past nine at night about a gift for the teacher and again at seven in the morning about whether tomorrow is own clothes day.

He is sixty-four. Most of the others are somewhere around thirty-one. And they are, and this part matters, absolutely lovely about it. They call him by his first name. They saved him a seat at the thing in the hall. One of them asked him seriously how you get a four year old to stay in bed, and he answered, and then had to look out of the window for a moment afterwards.

But there is a particular comedy to the second time round, and anybody living in it knows every line of it.

The car seats have become engineering. There is a strap arrangement now that requires a diagram, and the diagram is a sticker on the side of the seat, and the sticker is upside down. The songs are all different. He knew every word of the songs the first time and does not know one of these, although he can hum four of them against his will. The book bag comes home with a reading record that has to be signed, initialled and dated, and he does all three, because he is a man who does what a form tells him.

And at about two on a Tuesday afternoon, in the chair by the window, he goes under for eleven minutes and would deny it in a court of law.

Then there is the other thing.

The bit that would never fit in a strip, because there is nothing funny in it at all. He is tired. Not the tired of one bad night. A deeper, structural tired that lives in the hips and behind the eyes, and he has never once said it out loud, because of how it would sound.

That is the trap, and anybody in this has felt the shape of it. To say "I am tired" out loud sounds like a complaint about a child you would step in front of a bus for. So it does not get said. It goes down instead, underneath the school run and the tea and the reading record, and it sits there getting heavier, uninspected, for years.

I am not going to ask about the reasons. They are yours, they are not the same as anybody else's, and they are not going into an article. I want to talk about the tired.

The tired is not a verdict on your love

Say the plain thing first, because it has probably never been said to you in this order.

Tiredness is not evidence about how much a person loves. It is evidence of how much is being done. Those are two different measurements taken with two different instruments, one of them a body and the other a heart, and a body keeps its own accounts and never once consults the heart before filing them.

You are not running low on love, and your body's report is not a moral document. Scripture says He knoweth our frame and remembereth that we are dust, which is God on the record noticing the limits of a body rather than filing a complaint about them. The Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by tiredness and has never treated it as a lapse.

There is a specific unfairness in the second round that nobody names out loud. The first time, everybody expected it. The school gate, the broken sleep, the standing up at midnight: it came with the age you were, and the whole world had a category for it. The second time there is no category. People say the word amazing, which is meant kindly and is not much use at four in the morning, and underneath the word amazing there is a quiet assumption that somebody doing an exceptional thing does not need what an ordinary parent needs.

You have every right to need what any parent needs, and it is not a concession granted to you. Scripture has Moses sat down on a stone with a man holding up each arm, and nothing in Exodus 17 calls that a weakness or apologizes for it. The Holy Spirit is the One who keeps sending the two men, and He usually sends them through a door somebody left open.

Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:18

Strength shown to the ones still coming

Read that again and notice its shape, because it is not the prayer people assume it is.

It is not a request for a quiet retirement. It is an old man asking God to keep him, on the record, for one specific purpose: until he has shown God's strength to this generation, and His power to every one that is to come. Every one that is to come. There is somebody in that line who has not been born yet, and a gray headed man is praying about them from a room they will never see.

You were not written out of the useful years, and this was never an unscheduled epilogue. Psalm 71 puts a gray headed man asking to be kept until he has shown God's strength to the generation still coming, and Scripture leaves that prayer in the mouth of somebody plainly past his own strength. The Holy Spirit answers it in the most ordinary way there is: a reading record, signed, initialled and dated.

And notice what the psalm does not ask for. It does not ask for energy. It does not ask for the years back, or for the man to be made thirty again. It asks that God would not forsake him, and the strength being shown is God's strength, which is the whole point of the sentence. The child at that table is not learning what a sixty-four year old can manage. The child is learning what God is like, from somebody who cannot manage and keeps turning up anyway.

You have been made the place where a child finds out what God is like. Scripture says the things we have heard and known, which our fathers have told us, are to be told to the generation to come, and Psalm 78 puts that telling in a household rather than in a building. The Holy Spirit does the teaching Himself, and He does it through whoever is actually there at bedtime.

None of this comes with a picture of a family on the front of a card. There is no correct shape here and there never was. Scripture is full of households that would not survive a Christmas newsletter, and God is at work in every one of them without one word of apology for the arrangement. He does not keep a preferred configuration. He keeps a table, and a child at it, and somebody who goes on making the tea.