The Men In My Family Are Demonstrative

His father wept openly at the table when he prayed, every week, for as long as he can remember.

That is not unusual in his family. It is the norm. His uncles are the same, his brother is worse, and there is an entire vocabulary of gesture in that house for things other families keep behind the sternum. It is one of the best things about them and he would not change it.

He has never been like that. Not out of restraint or disapproval, and not because he is cold, which he is not. His face simply does not do it, and it never has, and at forty three he has stopped expecting it to.

So when the thing happened to him last year, it happened the way everything happens to him: internally, completely, and with no external evidence whatsoever.

And he has spent thirteen months quietly certain it did not count, because in that house the sign of a thing is visible, and a man with no sign has, by the only measure he grew up with, nothing to show.

If you did not match your own family's shape, come and sit in the courtyard. Nobody in your household is going to be criticized here.

A family's manner is not a measure

Let us look at the standard being applied, because it was absorbed rather than taught and that makes it very hard to see.

His family expresses inward things outwardly. That is a temperament and a culture and it is a good one, and in that house it functions as evidence: when a man is moved, everybody can tell, and nobody has to guess.

Applied to God it produces a rule that nobody in that family would ever state out loud, because stating it would immediately reveal it as odd: that a work of God is confirmed by the face of the man it happens to.

You were not given something inferior because nothing showed. Nothing about your face has ever been the evidence for what God did in you. I am not saying it to comfort you. The written word says man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), which puts the two kinds of looking side by side and names which one God does, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a man of forty three at a family table.

The verse that starts with difference

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a word against your father.

Paul opens the whole subject with variety, before he says anything else about it.

Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit.1 Corinthians 12:4

Diversities first. He does not begin with the standard form and then make allowances. He begins by saying the outcomes differ and then immediately anchors them all to one Giver, and he repeats that structure three times in three verses, with administrations and operations.

The structure is the argument. Different on the outside, identical in origin.

You and your brother were given by the same Spirit, and Scripture puts the difference in the shape rather than in the source. That is written into the sentence structure itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands that in a man who has never once wept at a table.

Nothing here is against your father's tears

Something must be said very plainly, because a page like this could easily turn into a defense of restraint.

Your father's weeping is not excess. It is not performance and it is not a lesser form of anything, and this article has nothing critical to say about a single man in your family. The relief here is not that quiet is more dignified.

There is no ranking on offer in either direction.

You have something that counts, and counting it takes nothing at all off your father or your brother. Scripture says there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord (1 Corinthians 12:5), where the differences and the sameness are asserted in one breath and neither is apologized for, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a family's manner, who decides the form.

And if these thirteen months have cost more than anybody at that table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, 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 a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.