I Stopped Asking Him to Come

There is a list he writes every year for the table, and four years ago one name came off it and nobody has ever mentioned it.

Ari writes it in the same notebook. He has done for twenty-two years, because there are enough of them that you have to plan the chairs, and the list is how he does it.

His younger son will not be in a room with his older son. That is the fact and it has been the fact for six years and Ari knows roughly why and does not know all of it, and both of his sons are grown men who have made it clear, separately and kindly, that it is not his to solve.

For the first two years he asked anyway.

He would ring, and there would be a pause, and his son would say something that was not no and was not yes, and then either not come or come very late and leave before the food, and both of those were worse than the pause.

The third year he asked and his son said, gently, Dad. Please stop.

And Ari said of course, and meant it, and the following autumn he wrote the list and did not put the name on it, and something in him went quiet that has not come back on.

He is sixty-three.

And what he has never said to anybody, including his wife, who knows anyway, is that the not-asking has become easier than the asking, and that this frightens him more than any of the rest of it.

Because a man can get used to a shorter list. Four years is enough. And there is a version of him, not far off, who writes that list without any feeling at all, and Ari has met men who got there and he does not want to be one.

And you may have your own list. Yours may be a table or a message you no longer send, and the not-sending may have become easier, and the ease may be the part that worries you.

The verb given to a person is seek and pursue, and it is not deliver

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it four years and it was never yours.

You are not the one who brings your sons into a room. You never were. Scripture assigns a person two verbs here and neither of them is achieve, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a father's persistence, who changes anything between two grown men. Set it down here at the table. It is heavy and it has been in that notebook every autumn.

Now hear the line, and hear how modest the assignment is.

They must turn from evil and do good; they must seek peace and pursue it.1 Peter 3:11

Seek it and pursue it.

Both of those are words about direction and neither of them is a word about arrival. A man who seeks has not found. A man who pursues is behind the thing he is chasing, by definition, and the sentence does not say catch.

That is the whole assignment and it is deliberately the whole assignment, written to people scattered and under pressure who could not have delivered peace to anybody.

Which means the four years of not asking are not the failure you think they are, and neither were the two years of asking. Both of those were seeking, done differently, in a situation you were told plainly is not yours to solve.

You are still in the assignment today. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who moves grown men, and He has never once handed a father the outcome.

Now let me be careful here, because there is a ditch on this side and I have no intention of putting you in it.

Nothing here says you should start asking again. Your son said please stop, and he said it gently, and honoring that is not cowardice and it may well be the most loving thing available. That is a decision inside your family and a page cannot make it and will not try.

And nothing here says either of your sons is at fault. You do not know all of it, you have said so, and Scripture does not require a villain here and neither should your account of it.

The point is only about the verbs, and Scripture gives you two that are about direction, and His Spirit is the one who holds the arrival.

Here is the plain part, and I will say it as you would want it said. The thing that frightens you is the right thing to be frightened of.

Not the shorter list. The prospect of writing it one day without feeling anything, and you are sixty-three and you have watched men arrive there. But a man who is afraid of that is not that man, and the fear is itself the seeking still running, which is exactly the word Scripture uses. His Spirit is the one who has kept it running for four years and He has not let it go out.