He Showed Me How To Do It

He said here, let me show you.

And he was completely kind about it. There was nothing in his voice and nothing in his face, and he crouched down and did the thing in about ninety seconds, talking the whole time in the way people talk when they are showing somebody something.

And you watched, and you said right, and thanks, and it was fine.

And then there was the two seconds afterward.

And in the two seconds something turned over in you that you have not been able to name all week, and it is not pride exactly, and it is not resentment at all, because you are glad he knows things.

It is closer to a small quiet lurch. Something like: that is the wrong way round.

There was an order in this house for twenty two years. One person showed and one person watched, and the showing went in one direction, and nobody ever said so because nobody needed to.

And on Saturday afternoon it went the other way, and nothing about it was wrong, and it still registered.

You are a father who was shown something by his son and not a father who was diminished, and a grown child who knows a thing his father does not has never once been a reversal of anything.

The glory of young men and the beauty of old men

There is a proverb that puts the two ages side by side, and the useful thing is that it gives each one something different.

The glory of young men is their strength: and the beauty of old men is the gray head. (Proverbs 20:29, King James Version)

Two clauses. Two different goods. And no comparison drawn between them anywhere in the sentence.

Strength belongs to the young. It is called their glory, which is a large word, and it is not hedged or qualified. And the gray head belongs to the old, and it is called beauty, which is a different large word and not a lesser one.

You are being given something the verse calls beauty while he is given something it calls glory, and two different goods named in one sentence have never once been the same good ranked. Proverbs 20:29 assigns each age its own thing without comparing them, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with a man replaying two seconds in a driveway.

And notice what the gray head actually stands for.

It is not knowledge of machines. It is what a life has accumulated: having seen things before, knowing how people behave, knowing what matters in six months and what does not, knowing which emergencies are emergencies.

That is not the same category as knowing how to do the thing he did in ninety seconds, and the two do not compete because they are not the same kind of thing.

You have a different category of thing entirely and it is not in competition, and a father who cannot do a specific task has never once been a father whose own portion went anywhere. The written word gives two ages two different goods, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps them from being weighed against each other.

And there is something in the word beauty that is worth a beat.

The verse could have said the wisdom of old men, or the authority. It says beauty, which is a word about being good to look at and to be near, and it is a strange and warm thing to say about a head of gray hair.

You are being described as something good to be near, and a man in his sixties has never once been described in that verse by what he can still do. Proverbs 20:29 calls it beauty rather than usefulness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a comfortable word for a man to sit with.

The order was always going to change

Something practical, and it is about what has actually happened over twenty two years. The showing went one way for a long time because the knowledge was distributed one way. That was not a hierarchy. It was a distribution, and distributions move.

He is twenty six and he does work his father does not do, with tools his father has never held. Some of what he knows could not have been taught to him at home, because it did not exist thirty years ago.

That is not the order breaking down. That is the order working exactly as intended, which is that each generation ends up holding something the previous one did not.

You are watching an arrangement work rather than one come apart, and a son who knows something his father does not has never once been evidence that anything went wrong. The written word gives the young their own glory outright, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a father see a handover as a handover.

Now the practical part, and it is a sentence that will be harder to say than it looks.

Say thank you, and then say I did not know that.

The thank you is easy. The second half is the one that has been avoided, all week, because it concedes the thing that the two seconds were about.

And it is the exact sentence that turns the whole thing from a reversal into a relationship. A man who says I did not know that to his own grown son has given that son something, and the something is worth more than the ninety seconds of instruction was.

You have a sentence available that hands something back to him, and a father saying I did not know that has never once been a father losing ground in his own driveway. Proverbs 20:29 gives each age its portion, and the Holy Spirit is the one in the driveway when a man says it out loud.

And he will be pleased. Not smug. Pleased, in the particular way a grown child is pleased to be useful to a parent, which is one of the things they want most and almost never get.

You have something to give a grown son tonight that he has wanted for years, and a father who receives from his own child has never once taken anything away from either of them. Proverbs 20:29 gives each age its portion, and the Holy Spirit is the one present while a short sentence gets said.