He Signs the Card With His First Name

It comes in the second week of December, and it has come in the second week of December for thirty-one years.

It is never a bad card. Usually a robin. Once, memorably, a photograph of a beach. Inside, in handwriting that has got shakier, there is a line about the weather where he is, sometimes a line about his health, and then his first name.

Not Dad. Not Love, Dad. His first name, the way a colleague signs a leaving card.

You were eleven. He went in the February and there was another family by the following winter, and there were two more children who are, technically, your half brothers, and whom you have met at one funeral for a total of about nine minutes.

You are forty-two. You have a good life and you are not fragile about this. You have done a certain amount of thinking about it and you are, on the whole, at peace with the facts.

It is only that the card comes, and you put it on the shelf because you cannot bring yourself to throw it out, and every year it sits there through Christmas being not quite anything. And every year, when you pick it up in January to put it in the drawer with the other thirty, a sentence goes through you. Always the same one. You have never said it out loud, not to your husband, not to anyone.

And the strange thing, the thing you would find hardest to explain, is that the sentence is not really angry. It is worse than angry. It is a summary.

God took the title Himself

Sit back in that chair. There is no hurry in this, and I am not going to tell you what you should have felt about a robin.

Let me be plain first, because Scripture would not have me be vague and the Spirit does not tidy things up prematurely: he left, and a line a year is not a relationship, and thirty-one cards do not add up to a father. That is a true accounting and nothing here asks you to revise it upward out of kindness. God is not confused about the February.

Now come and look at a verse most people skip because they are reading it for the first half.

Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the fatherless.Psalm 10:14

There are two things in there and I want both of them.

Thou hast seen it. Not you will hear about it, not somebody should tell you. Seen. Already. Every year of it, the eleven-year-old and the February and the shelf and the drawer with thirty cards in it.

And then, at the end, God does something He does not have to do. He takes a title. Thou art the helper of the fatherless. He does not merely sympathize with a condition; He attaches Himself to it by name. It is one of the few titles in Scripture God gives Himself in relation to a specific kind of loss, and He did it without anyone asking Him to.

God has seen the whole of it and He has taken that title over you personally, and He did it long before you were old enough to know what was missing. That is not me consoling a woman with a card in her hand. That is what the psalm says He has done and what He calls Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a living room in January.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a man who left. When you say a blessing over him, you are not thanking him, and you are not calling the cards enough, and you are not opening anything. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a man He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it. It asks nothing of him and it expects nothing back.

A blessing said in your own room does not turn thirty-one cards into a relationship, and it was never going to. Scripture says the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart (Psalm 34:18), which is a statement about proximity and not about repair, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true in a room rather than merely accurate on a page.

What the summary is doing

Now let me name the thing you said you would find hardest to explain, because I think you named it exactly right and I want to stay with it.

It is not anger. Anger would be simpler and it would have burnt out by now. It is a summary: a settled, tidy, one-sentence account of a man, arrived at over decades, filed and closed. It is the sentence a person reaches when they have finally stopped hoping, and stopping hoping felt like maturity, and in a lot of ways it was.

But a summary is a small coffin for a person, and holding one takes a little energy every year. And it has quietly become the thing you have instead of a father, which means he is still occupying the space, only now as a verdict rather than as a man.

That is not hardness in you and I will not call it that. It is what a person does with an ache that has no address, and what is written never once required an apology before somebody could be free. The Spirit is not asking you to hope again. He is asking for the sentence.

You are not fatherless, whatever the second week of December has been telling you for thirty-one years. It is written that God is the helper of the fatherless, and that He sets the solitary in families (Psalm 68:6), and the same Spirit who breathed those lines is in this room with the lamp on, which is why they land as an arrangement already made rather than as an offer.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to write back, to phone him, to try again, to go and see him while there is time, or to introduce yourself properly to two men you met for nine minutes. Nothing here asks you for contact of any kind. Blessing is not reconciliation, it is not an opening, and it does not oblige you to want a single thing from him.

What you say alone in a room is a real thing, and it is complete without him ever knowing it happened. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and it does not need to reach a man in another county to have been said.