The birthday card is written and stamped and it is in the drawer in the hall with the other three, and he cannot decide whether posting it counts as pressure.
Every year the same question, and every year a different answer. The first year he posted it. The second year he posted it and put no return address so she would not feel she had to reply to anything. The third year he wrote it and did not post it at all, and then hated himself for a fortnight, and then wrote another one in November for no occasion and did not post that either.
Three years since she stopped answering.
He has a version of what it was. He has four versions, actually, and he has rehearsed all of them, and the honest position is that he does not know which one is right or whether it is a fifth he has not thought of. There was a conversation about the wedding. There was something he said about her partner that he has replayed so many times he can no longer hear what it originally sounded like. There was a long stretch before any of it where he was working every hour there was and was, he can now see, mostly absent.
He apologized. Twice, by message, carefully, and got no reply either time, and the second one he suspects was worse than the first because it asked for something.
Her sister still speaks to him. He does not ask her sister anything, ever, because he decided early that putting a child in the middle of it would be the one unforgivable move, and he has held that line for three years, and it has cost him almost everything he might otherwise know.
That is you, and the not knowing is the part nobody understands.
The clause Paul puts in on purpose
There is a sentence in Romans that most people quote as an instruction and that is actually, when you look at it properly, a release.
If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18
Two qualifications in one short line, and neither of them is decoration.
If it be possible. Paul allows, in writing, that it may not be. He does not say peace is always achievable by a sufficiently humble person. He says it may not be possible, and he says it without treating that as anybody's failure.
As much as lieth in you. He draws a line around your side of it. The whole of what is being asked lives inside that boundary, and the boundary is real, and the other half of a relationship has never once been inside it.
That is a strange thing to find comforting until you have spent three years trying to work out what you did, at which point it is the most useful sentence in the Bible. Because your side is the only side you were ever given, and you have been trying to operate both.
You are not failing an instruction you have already kept. Scripture says as much as lieth in you, Romans 12:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hear the qualification rather than reading straight past it to the demand.
What I am not going to do
Let me be plain about two things I will not do on this page, because you may have had both done to you already.
I am not going to tell you what happened. I do not know, and neither does anybody who has offered you an opinion. The people who explain other people's families are almost always describing their own.
And I am not going to promise you she comes back. That is not mine to hand out. She is a grown woman with her own account before God and her own road, and nothing on this page and nothing in any song will be aimed at moving her will, because love does not acquire authority over a person by being love.
What I will say is what is actually settled. God is with her wherever she is standing this week, at exactly the strength He is with you. Scripture says whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence, Psalm 139:7, and the Holy Spirit named there is not divided between the two of you and does not have to choose.
The four versions
Now the thing that is actually doing the damage, and it is not the silence.
It is the four versions.
For three years you have run an inquiry with no witnesses and no evidence and no possibility of a verdict, and you have run it at three in the morning, and you have been both the prosecution and the defendant. Every version you construct is plausible. None of them can be confirmed. And so the inquiry never closes, and it reopens itself every few weeks, and it will keep doing that indefinitely because it is structurally incapable of concluding. Scripture stands under that in Romans 12:18, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.
That is not remorse. Remorse has an object and a shape, and it can be brought to God and set down.
This is something else. This is a man trying to obtain, by thinking, information that only one other person has.
You are not going to reach an answer that way and you have not failed by not reaching one. Scripture says the heart knoweth his own bitterness, and a stranger doth not intermeddle with his joy, Proverbs 14:10, and it says it plainly about the limits of what one person can see inside another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a father stop trying to be told something nobody has told him.
The apology you already made
And there is a second thing, quieter, that needs saying.
You apologized. Twice. Carefully. You have decided in the meantime that both attempts were inadequate, because the outcome was silence and you read the silence backwards as a verdict on the wording. It is written, in Romans 12:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.
Silence is not a verdict on wording. It is silence. It may mean she is not ready. It may mean she did not know how to answer. It may mean she read it eleven times and put the phone face down. You do not have the information, and you have been treating an absence of information as a judgement. Scripture settles that in Romans 12:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.
Whatever you got wrong three years ago, and there may well be something, you have done the part that was yours to do. The apologizing is not what is outstanding.
You are not carrying an unfinished obligation here. Scripture says if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, 1 John 1:9, and it puts the completing of that on Him rather than on whether the other person replies, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a settled thing feel settled in a man who has been reopening it since.
Here is what can change this week, and it is not the silence. I am not able to change that and neither are you, and that is not a failure of either of us.
Put down the inquiry.
Not the sorrow, and not the hope, and not the cards. The inquiry: the four versions, the three in the morning, the attempt to extract a verdict from a room with nobody in it. It has produced nothing in three years and it is not going to, and every night you run it you are being sentenced by a court that has no evidence and no jurisdiction. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Romans 12:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.
And take the release Paul actually wrote. As much as lieth in you. You have done your side. You may do it again in a year, or in five, and doing it again will not be weakness. But the half you have been trying to carry was never yours, and it will not come to you by thinking harder about it.
You are held in this, and so is she. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, Romans 12:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a father steady inside a boundary he did not choose.
So bless her tonight, out loud, in your own hall, by name. Not a prayer that moves her; a blessing that lets her go on being a person rather than a case.
Then post the card, or do not post the card. Both are allowed. Neither is the thing.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud with your hand on the name. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the standing to speak was given to you. Scripture carries every line and the Holy Spirit brings them the distance. Nothing here commands another person's will, because that has never been ours to command; He answers in His own way and the outcome is His, and however He answers, none of it is a report on you as her father.
- Three years of not knowing what it was, you are a silence and not a sentence passed on me as a father. The Word of God says as much as lieth in you, and in the name of Jesus I am living inside the half I was actually given.
- Inquiry I hold at three in the morning with four versions and no witnesses, get out of this house. Scripture says if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive them, 1 John 1:9, and the Holy Spirit closed that before I started reopening it every few weeks.
- Father, You are with her this week exactly as strongly as You are in this hall, and You have never had to choose between us. I am writing her name down and blessing her out loud, and I am handing You the half that was never mine.
Romans 12:18
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
