The Four Safe Subjects

She takes the call on the loop.

Four o'clock on a Sunday, out the back gate, down the track to the reservoir, phone in the coat pocket with the earbuds in, because the call goes better when she is moving. Forty minutes for the loop. Twenty-two minutes for her father.

They have got very good at this.

The knee, which is doing well since the shots. The weather where he is and the weather where she is, compared. The neighbor's new addition, up for eleven weeks now and blocking the light off his kitchen window. And the dog, who is fourteen and getting stiff, and about whom he can be genuinely, unguardedly funny, so they save the dog for last.

Four subjects. Two hundred and something calls a year.

One Sunday in February she was tired and half listening, and she found a receipt in her coat pocket and a pencil stub, and she wrote them down on the back of it while he was talking about the shots. Knee. Weather. Extension. Dog.

Four items. She stood at the reservoir gate afterward looking at the list in her hand and worked out that it had taken about eleven years to get it that short.

Then last Sunday something happened out of order.

He was on the addition, and the scaffolding, and how they have not asked him about anything, and then he stopped in the middle of it. Just went quiet. Two seconds, maybe three, which is a long time on a phone call.

And he said, "Do you still go, then. On a Sunday."

Not a challenge. Not the voice he used eleven years ago when he said the thing he said, the one sentence she took as final and never asked him about since. A different voice altogether. Slower. Almost careful.

She had about half a second.

And she said, "They're saying rain for you tomorrow, aren't they."

He said they were, and went back to the scaffolding. The dog came last, and he was funny about the dog, and she said love you and he said you take care now, and the call ended at twenty-three minutes, a minute over.

She stood at the reservoir gate in the dark with the phone in her hand and could not work out why she felt sick.

He reached. And she handed him the weather.

To his own master he standeth

Paul wrote one line to a room full of people who were certain about each other and could not sit at the same table, and the astonishing thing is what he does not do.

Who art thou that judgest another man's servant? to his own master he standeth or falleth. Yea, he shall be holden up: for God is able to make him stand.Romans 14:4

He does not settle it, and he had the standing to. He takes the man out of the room's jurisdiction altogether and hands him to a Master, and then he adds a sentence nobody was expecting.

He shall be holden up.

You are not your father's master and you were never appointed one, and that is not a diminishing, it is a release, because Romans 14:4 puts him in the hands of Somebody who can actually hold a man, and the Holy Spirit has been doing that holding all the years you were managing a phone call.

Now let me say the thing about the four subjects, gently, because you did not do anything wrong.

That list is not peace.

You have been calling it peace, and calling it maturity, and calling it honoring your father, and there is real love in it, more than you give yourself credit for. But a list that has shrunk from everything to four items over eleven years is not a treaty. It is grief with a lid on it. You have been quietly bereaved of your own father while he is still on the phone every Sunday at four, still funny about the dog, still asking after your knee.

That is the ache, and I am not talking you out of feeling it. Romans 14 does not scold one minute of those eleven years, and the Holy Spirit has never once stood over you with a stopwatch.

You have permission to grieve a living man, and to stop calling that arrangement peace.

Here is what changes tonight, and it is not what you think.

I am not asking you to soften one thing you believe. Not one. That conviction cost you something, it is yours, and it is not on the table here. And I am not asking you to raise it on the next call, or to write the letter, or to have the conversation you have been not having. I do not know your father, and a stranger does not get to spend that.

What changes is who is holding him, and Romans 14:4 answered that a long time ago, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed the job over to you.

You have been carrying a case you were never handed. Somewhere in the eleventh year the whole weight of whether that man ever comes to anything settled onto your shoulders, as though the outcome ran through you, and Romans 14:4 says plainly that it runs through his own Master, who is able. Not who might. Who is able.

Hear the honest edge of it, because I will not sell you what Scripture does not say. God is able to make him stand is not a guarantee about your father, and anybody who tells you it is has gone past the text. It is a statement about who is holding him, and the answer is not you and never was.

Which means you get to put the case down. You are not the outcome, you are the daughter, and the God who is able has been at work in that man in ways your Sunday call was never shown, and the Holy Spirit does not report to you.

Then Paul says the thing that makes a room possible.

Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God.Romans 15:7

Received. Not agreed with. Christ received you a long way from agreement, He never made the door conditional on your arriving at the right answer, and He has not shut it since.

There was a man once who was put out of a colony in the winter, on foot, for what he believed, and he built a place of his own where the people who put him out would have been welcome to live. That is what liberty of conscience costs, and it is not agreement and it is not softness: it is a door left unlatched by somebody with every reason to bolt it.

You can hold what you believe with your whole weight and leave that door unlatched, both at once, and Romans 15:7 says Christ did exactly that with you first, and the Holy Spirit is well able to keep open a door you have not the strength to hold yourself.