Open Hands · Week 4 · Tuesday · HURT
It was a Tuesday evening and somebody had left shoes in the doorway again, and he heard a voice come out of his own mouth and he knew immediately whose it was.
It was not the words. The words were ordinary; something about how many times he has to ask. It was the pitch of it, and the way it arrived with no warning at all over something that did not matter, and most of all the quality of the quiet afterward. He knows that quiet from the inside. He is thirty-eight years old and he can still tell you what the carpet looked like in the house he grew up in, from about that height.
It Goes Somewhere
Paul has a line about this that I think is more practical than it sounds.
Get rid of all bitterness, rage and anger, outcry and slander, along with every form of malice.Ephesians 4:31 (BSB)
Get rid of. Not manage, not contain, not get better at hiding. And I think the reason he puts it that strongly is that this stuff does not actually sit still inside a person. It comes out somewhere. Usually not at whoever caused it, because that person is often not available or not safe to aim at, and so it goes out at whoever is smallest and nearest and least able to do anything about it.
A seven-year-old in a doorway is smallest and nearest.
What I notice about the Joseph family is how far the pattern travels. Jacob plays favorites with Joseph, and Jacob himself was the favored son of a mother who helped him cheat his brother out of a blessing. It was done to him and then he did it, and the sons it was done to went and did something worse. Nobody in that chain decided to pass it on. They just did not stop it.
It did not go anywhere. It went downhill, to the smallest person in the house.
Something You Put On
Therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with hearts of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience.Colossians 3:12 (BSB)
Clothe yourselves is a good image for a man in his position, because clothing is a thing you put on deliberately, every day, and it is not the same as becoming a different person overnight. Nobody wakes up patient. You put it on in the morning, and some days you forget, and you put it on again.
That matters because the honest version of his situation is not that he is going to stop having his father’s temper. It is in him. It came with the house. What he can do is notice it faster and do something about it afterward, and keep doing that for twenty years.
What It Cost
He went back in and apologized to a seven-year-old.
Not the adult kind of apology, where you explain the kind of day you had and how the shoes really are a problem and everyone agrees to move on. He sat down on the floor, which took some doing, and told his son that he had been wrong, and that it was not about the shoes and it was not about him.
His son said okay and asked if they could play something. Children are generous in a way that is almost difficult to be around.
Here is why that small thing is not small. His father has never done it. Not once, not about anything, and the man is seventy-four now and it is not going to happen. So when he sat down on that floor he was doing something he had no template for. He had never seen it, so he had nothing to copy.
It stopped there, that night. That is all anyone can say about it. It will come up again, probably this week, and he will have to stop it again. But a thing that has run through three generations of one family got to a doorway on a Tuesday and did not get through.
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