My Father's Laugh

It happened at a christening, in the corridor outside the hall, holding a paper cup.

His cousin said something about an aunt, nothing special, the kind of remark that has been made about that aunt for thirty years, and he laughed.

And it was his father's laugh.

Not similar. Not a family resemblance. The exact thing, the two-part thing where the first half is almost silent and then the second half arrives too loud and goes on slightly too long, the laugh he used to be able to hear from the other end of the apartment when he was seven and knew that everything was all right.

His father has been gone six years.

He stood in that corridor with a paper cup in his hand and did not know what to do with his face.

And here is what came after it, over the next few weeks, and has not left.

He never chose that. There was no day he decided to laugh like his father. He did not practice it and he did not want it, and for most of his twenties he would have told you he was working fairly hard at not becoming that man in several respects. And it went in anyway. Twenty-two years in the same rooms, and it went in through the walls.

So he can tell you exactly how a person picks up a likeness. Proximity and time. That is the whole mechanism.

Which leaves the question he has been carrying since March, and it is not a comfortable one.

He has been following Jesus for nineteen years. And if his father's laugh got into him without permission in twenty-two, what has nineteen years put into him that anybody could point at? What has come out of his mouth, in a corridor, that made somebody stop?

He cannot think of one thing. Not one.

Likeness comes from living near somebody for years

Let me start with the corridor, because it has been treated as an accusation ever since, and it was a gift.

What happened there was your father, alive in you, six years after the funeral, in front of a cousin, without one act of will from anybody. That is a good thing that occurred at a christening and you have spent five months prosecuting yourself with it.

But hear this, and take it as a finished thing rather than as reassurance: you are being made like Him, and the mechanism is exactly the one you named. That is not my kind reading of a hard question, it is what stands written in John's first letter, where likeness to Christ is put as something that arrives through seeing Him rather than through achieving Him, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired that line has been in the room with you for nineteen years.

Read what the apostle actually claims, and notice that he does not claim to be able to see it either.

Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.1 John 3:2

What we will be has not yet been made known. The man writing that had walked with Jesus in person, and he says plainly that the finished thing is not visible yet, to him, about himself.

So your inability to point at a resemblance puts you in the company of the apostle, not outside it. And this is yours right now rather than something to earn: you are a child of God today, in the present tense, on the same page that admits the likeness is not yet on show, because Scripture puts both of those in one breath and the Spirit of God is the one carrying the second one to completion.

Now let me take your own mechanism and finish it for you, because you stopped it one step early.

Proximity and time. You are right, and it is not only right about laughs. It is right about the way a man handles being interrupted. It is right about what he does with a phone call from somebody who is difficult. It is right about the size of the thing he will let go.

You were looking for a resemblance you could hear. But the things that go in through the walls over nineteen years are rarely audible, and the written word says we are being transformed into His image from one degree of glory to another, which is a description of something that happens to a person, not something they perform, and it names the Spirit of the Lord as the one doing it.

And here is the guard on this, because it is the place where a piece like this can do harm.

Nothing in this makes you Christ or gets you anywhere near it. Likeness is not identity, a son is not his father, and everything you have is given and nothing is native. The resemblance is His work in a creature, and it stays that on the last day the same as today. That is written plainly into the same letter, and the Holy Spirit is a giver of a likeness and never a maker of equals.

Nor is there a level you are supposed to have reached by nineteen years. There is no scale. If you take a measurement out of this article you have taken the wrong thing.