What The Pain Took From My Children

There is a swimming bag by the back door and it has been there nine days.

It is the small one with the frog on it, and inside it there is a towel that was folded by a nine year old, badly, the way a nine year old folds a towel when she is trying to make something easy for somebody. That is the part that gets him. She packed it herself. She left it where he would see it. She has not asked about it since Sunday, and he knows exactly what that silence is, because he taught her that silence without ever meaning to.

Swimming is two hours. Two hours means the walk from the car park, and the bending to lace the trainers, and the plastic chairs, and then the walk back with wet things, and that is a day he does not have in him this week or last week or the week before that. So the bag sits. And every time he goes past it to put the bin out, he pays a small toll.

He keeps a ledger. He would not call it that, but he could read it to you from memory. The sports day he watched from the car. The bedtime stories that got shorter and then became a chapter every other night and then became her reading to him. The holiday they took an hour from home because he could not do the drive. The birthday when the game he had promised became a film, and she said it was better anyway, and meant it, and that was worse.

The line at the bottom of the ledger is one sentence, and it is the sentence that actually hurts. My children are getting a smaller version of me.

If you are reading this with a hand somewhere on your own body, holding a place that has been loud for months or years, you have a bag by your own door. Yours might be a bike in the shed, or a garden that has gone over, or a phone full of photographs you are in fewer of. And you have a ledger too, and you have read it this week.

I am going to take it off you now.

The ledger was never yours to keep

Start here, because it is the thing nobody says out loud to somebody in your position.

You have been carrying two entirely different weights and calling them one. The first is the pain itself, which is real, and heavy, and not a spiritual problem. The second is the verdict you have handed down about what the pain has made you. And the second one is not from God. It never was.

Look at how that verdict is built. It compares you against a version of yourself who does not exist, has never existed, and was invented by your own accusation. That imaginary parent takes her swimming every week and never has a bad afternoon and never says not today, love, and you have been losing to him for years. Nobody wins against a person who is not real. That is not humility. That is a trial with only one witness, and he is not honest.

Here is what the Word actually does with a body that will not cooperate.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Most gladly therefore I will rather glory in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest on me.2 Corinthians 12:9

Read the middle of that again, because English hides the shock of it. Made perfect in weakness. Not made perfect despite weakness. Not tolerated in weakness. The weakness is the place where the power is finished off, completed, brought to its full working. Paul asked three times for the thing to go, which means Paul was not a man who had made peace with it, and the answer he got back was not a rebuke and it was not a cure. It was a sentence about where God's strength actually shows up.

And he says it was said to him. Not published as a general principle. Spoken to a particular man about a particular thorn he was sick of.

So the question of your house is not whether you are the parent you would be without this. You are not. Neither of us is going to pretend otherwise, and pretending is not faith. The question is what your children are actually receiving, and you have never once totted that column up, because you only keep the losses.

Let me tot it up for you.

They are receiving a parent who tells the truth about a hard body instead of performing an easy one. They are receiving a house where somebody says I cannot today out loud and is still loved at dinner, which is a lesson most adults are still trying to learn at forty. They are receiving the sight of a person who keeps going without being fine, and if you think that is a small inheritance, you have not met the number of grown people who fold at the first thing that does not resolve.

And they are receiving something you cannot see from inside it. A child does not remember the pool. A child remembers whether they were wanted in the room.