He Never Said It and He Is Gone

The bench in the shop was his father's and the vise on it was his father's father's, and there is a mark on the left hand end where somebody a hundred years ago set a hot pipe down and never owned up to it.

Wade is fifty one. He has been in this shop since he was seven years old, first sweeping and then holding and then working.

His daddy died in 2019. Eighty three, in his own bed, quick, which everybody agreed was a mercy.

And in all those years, from the sweeping to the holding to the working to the end, the old man never once said it. Not the word itself and not any version of it. He said, that will do. He said, you got it. Once, in about 1994, when Wade had fixed something the old man had not been able to fix, he said, well, look at that, and Wade has taken that sentence out and looked at it more times than he would like to say.

For twenty two years there was something over the top of it. Wade would not have said he was drinking about his father. He would have said he liked a drink. That is what he would have said, and he believed it.

He quit in the spring. And what he found, at fifty one years old, standing at a bench that belonged to a dead man, is that he is still waiting. Still. At fifty one. For a sentence from a man who has been in the ground five years.

You know that waiting. It might be a father, a mother, a person who is still alive and never going to say it. You are a grown adult with a life of your own, and there is a piece of you that is still standing there with its hand up.

You are met in the waiting by God Himself, and you were never left to wait it out alone. The psalm says a father of the fatherless, a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation, and that is a title God takes rather than one anybody assigns Him; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact in a workshop that smells of sawdust and old oil.

A father of the fatherless

Let me be careful here, because there is a way of talking about this that does more harm than good.

I am not going to tell you what was wrong with your father. I did not know him, and a page cannot put a dead man on trial, and most of the men of that generation who could not say it had reasons that were handed to them by their own fathers and never once examined. I am not going to explain him to you. And I am not going to tell you that getting to the bottom of this is what will keep you standing, because that would put your whole life on the far side of a piece of work nobody has assigned you.

What I will do is show you where God put Himself.

A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.Psalm 68:5

He takes the title. Nobody voted on it and nobody offered it to Him. In a psalm that is mostly about God going out at the head of an army, in the middle of chariots and mountains and thunder, He stops and names Himself the father of the ones who have not got one.

You are somebody God named Himself for, and you were never a category He had to be talked into. That is what stands written in Psalm 68, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a title taken in a war psalm land on a man in a workshop at fifty one.

And notice where He is when He takes it: in his holy habitation. Not down at the edge of things, not in a corner reserved for hard cases. At home, in His own place, at the center. Being a father to the fatherless is not a side occupation He goes out to. It is a thing He is where He lives.

You are attended to from the center rather than the margins, and you were never a case He had to make a special trip for. Scripture puts the title in His holy habitation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that geography mean something to a man standing at a bench that belonged to somebody else.

And here is the one that changes the shop. That word for father in the psalm is not a distant, formal word. It is the ordinary one. The one a child uses. Which means when God takes that title over your particular gap, He is not offering to be a patron or a benefactor. He is stepping into the exact slot the sentence was supposed to come out of.

You have the gap itself filled by somebody, and you were never being offered a substitute for it. The written word uses the ordinary word for father and not a formal one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts God in the specific place a sentence never came from.

And the plain thing, and I mean this the same way I would mean it standing in that shop with you. A man does not have to sort this out on his own and there is no medal for trying. A counselor is a good thing and going to one at fifty one is not a failure of any kind. Your doctor, a counselor, a friend who has known you thirty years, the room in the church basement on a Tuesday. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and I would rather you sat in front of one than stood in a shop being strong about it.