Before She Needs Him

She turned nineteen in March and he took her out for the meal and it was a good evening and both of them enjoyed it.

And in the car park afterwards, unlocking, he had the thought he has been having since she was about fourteen, which is: I am not ready.

Not for her leaving. She left in September and that has been fine, better than fine, and he is proud of her in a way that catches him at traffic lights.

Ready for the other thing. The thing that has not happened yet.

Because he has watched it happen twice in this family. His sister at twenty-three, and his cousin, and both times there came a day when a young woman needed her father to be a particular kind of man, and one of those fathers was and one of them was not, and the difference has run through two families for thirty years.

So he has been getting ready since she was fourteen.

He has been working on his temper, which is better. He has been working on being a man who can sit with something without fixing it, which is not better and which he would tell you is the whole of the problem. He has read things. He went to see somebody for a while, in a year when things were hard, and it helped and then he stopped.

And she is nineteen, and the clock in his head is running faster now, and every month that passes without him being finished feels like a month closer to a day when it will be too late to have become anybody.

Those who wait renew, and nobody arrives complete

Let me be honest about what is driving this before we go anywhere else, because it is worth naming and it is not vanity.

You watched two young women need their fathers and you saw what it cost when the man was not there in the way that was needed. That is not an abstraction to you, it is a family, and you have carried it since you were young enough not to have any say in it.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: the strength for that day is not something you accumulate in advance, and Scripture is explicit about where it comes from. That is not my kind reading of five years of preparing, it is what stands written in Isaiah, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line was in a car park in March.

Read it carefully, because it is quoted constantly and the tense is usually missed.

But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.Isaiah 40:31

Will renew. Continuously, on the way, as it is needed. Not have renewed. Not have stockpiled.

Read what comes just before it, too: even youths grow tired, and young men stumble and fall. The passage is explicitly about the failure of accumulated human strength, and the answer it gives is not more accumulation.

So this is yours right now rather than pending your becoming a finished man: the strength arrives at the point of need rather than before it, because the written word puts the renewing in the waiting and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies it on the day.

Now let me say the harder and kinder thing, which is about what she will actually need.

You have been assuming she will need a man who has arrived, and nothing written anywhere says that, and the Holy Spirit has never made a father wait to be finished before he was useful. Look at the two you watched.

The father who was there in the way she needed was not a finished man. You know that better than anybody, because you knew him. He had the same faults in his sixties that he had in his forties, and everybody in that family could name them.

What he had was that he came. He turned up, unfinished, on the day, and did not manage it well, and stayed.

The other man did not come. And the difference between them was never a difference in character achieved by a deadline.

That is what she is going to need from you, and it is not five more years of work, and it is not out of reach on any Tuesday between now and then. What is written says the renewing comes to those who wait, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been building a man who turns up rather than a man who is ready.

And the guard, because this must not turn into a license to coast: nothing here says stop the work. Go back to the person you were seeing, because you stopped and you know you stopped. Keep at the thing about sitting with something without fixing it. Just stop running it against her birthday.