My Father Never Told Me What Happened

She was eleven. She remembers the coat on the hook, and that he did not take it off, and that her mother went into the kitchen and shut the door.

He had gone out that morning as the minister of that church and he came home at about four in the afternoon and he was not, and it was to do with what had been happening there, and that is the entire extent of what she knows.

He never spoke about it. Not that year and not in the twenty six years afterward. He was not bitter, and he did not go cold, and he took a job at a builders merchant and worked there until he retired, and he prayed with his family every evening for the rest of his life without a trace of complaint in it.

She asked him twice. Once at nineteen, when she got a straight, kind answer that was not an answer. Once at thirty four, when he took her hand and said that she was better off without it, and changed the subject, and she never asked again.

He has been gone four years. Whatever happened went with him.

So she has spent thirty years reading a silence, and it has shaped her life more than most of the things she was actually told. She does not know whether her father was wronged, or wrong, or neither. She does not know whether the thing she herself believes about God is the thing that cost her family everything, or the thing her family was defending.

If you inherited a silence, come in and sit down. Nobody in that story is going to be tried on this page, because nobody on this page knows.

An absence can be inherited like a debt

Let us name what was actually handed down, because it was not nothing and it was never explained.

She did not inherit a grievance. She would have known what to do with a grievance. She inherited a hole in the account of her own family, and a hole makes a child work: she has been filling it since she was eleven with guesses, and every guess has come with a different set of consequences for who she thinks her father was.

That is a real loss, and it has run for thirty years, and it has never once been named in that family as a thing anybody lost.

You are not making too much of this. Nothing you were never told has ever stopped costing you something. I am not saying that to open old ground. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children (Deuteronomy 29:29), which draws a line between what is His and what is ours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman who has been reading a closed door since she was eleven.

The line that divides the known from the withheld

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it puts nothing on her father.

Read where that verse puts the boundary, and notice what it does with the part on the far side.

The secret things belong unto the LORD our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever.Deuteronomy 29:29

Belong. Both halves are described as belonging to somebody. The withheld part is not floating unassigned, waiting for a diligent enough daughter to recover it. It has an owner, and the owner is God.

And the revealed half is given to us and to our children for ever, which means what she actually has is not a scrap left over from a real inheritance. It is the inheritance.

You may stop working on the sealed half, and Scripture assigns it an owner who is not you. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it to a woman thirty years into a search.

Nobody in that story is being judged here

Something has to be said very plainly, or this page starts convicting people whose names she does not even know.

Her father is not being judged. Whatever he decided about telling her, he decided as a man who kept praying with his family every evening for twenty six years, and men who take a job at a builders merchant and never complain are usually protecting somebody rather than hiding something.

And the people on the other side of it are not being judged either. She does not know who they were, or what was in front of them, or what it cost them, and neither does anybody writing this.

This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of them was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the qualifier acknowledges that some of the work is not available to a person, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not an answer, who lets a woman keep her father whole.

And if these thirty years have cost more than the family in that room knows, if sleep has gone, if the not knowing has begun to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.