I Heard What I Said About My Son

You heard it as it left. That is the part that has stayed with you.

There is a strange half second where a sentence is already out and you are still catching up to it, and in that half second you knew exactly what you had said and exactly who was standing there.

He did not react. That is somehow worse. He did something with his face that was not quite anything and carried on with what he was doing.

And you have gone over it about two hundred times since Thursday.

Here is the honest version of what you have been doing with it, because I think you have been alternating between two things and neither of them is working.

The first is minimizing. It was a small remark, he barely noticed, everybody says things, and this is largely true and it does not settle anything.

The second is a plan to apologize. You have drafted it. You know how it would go, and you also know, if you are honest, that a sixteen year old being formally apologized to about his own body is going to have a much larger event than the one he actually had.

So you have done nothing for four days and it is still sitting there.

That which is good to the use of edifying

There is an instruction in Ephesians about speech that does something more useful than telling you to be careful.

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers. (Ephesians 4:29, King James Version)

Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good for building up, that it may minister grace to the hearers.

Notice the structure. It is not a prohibition with a gap after it. It is a replacement.

You have a verse that removes one kind of speech and puts another in its place, and Ephesians 4:29 has never once left a household with only a silence where a habit used to be. The instruction is to speak what builds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies a household with something to say instead.

You are able to see why that matters for what happens next. A rule that only forbids leaves a father watching himself, and a watched father is a stiff father, and a sixteen year old reads stiffness as displeasure.

The verse does not ask you to be careful. It asks you to be occupied with something else.

And the last clause is the specific aim: that it may minister grace unto the hearers. The purpose of the speech is what it does to the person receiving it. Not accuracy, not honesty, not even kindness in the abstract. What it does to them.

You are able to put something in the place where the remark came from, and Ephesians 4:29 has never once made watching yourself the remedy. The Spirit of God is the one who changes what a man talks about rather than how carefully he says it, and the verse names the replacement in the same sentence as the removal.

Why the apology would cost him more

Here is the practical judgment, and I want to make the case properly because your instinct to apologize is a good instinct.

An apology names the thing and makes it permanent.

You have a son who has not yet decided what that sentence was, and Ephesians 4:29 has never once required a formal repair for a passing remark. It is written that speech should minister grace to the hearers, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows what a boy of sixteen is actually carrying.

Right now, in him, that remark is somewhere between nothing and something small. It is one item and it has not been filed anywhere.

If you sit him down, it becomes an event. It gets a location in his memory and a date. It becomes the day my father sat me down about my body, which is a much larger object than the thing he currently has.

And it tells him that you think it landed hard, which is information he did not have, and which will make him wonder how hard it should have landed.

That is not a reason to do nothing. It is a reason to do something else, and the something else has to be in the same currency as the offense, which was physical rather than verbal.

You are able to repair this in the place where it happened rather than in a conversation about it, and doing it that way has never once been the coward's version. The Spirit of God is the one who ministers grace through what a father does, and Ephesians 4:29 puts the aim of speech in its effect on the hearer.

Ten minutes, and nothing about him

So here is the assignment.

Go and do ten minutes with him this week and talk about nothing except the thing in your hands.

You are able to be beside him doing something physical with no assessment in the air, and its absence has never once needed to be pointed out. It is written that our speech should be good to the use of edifying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present on a driveway with two people and a ball.

Not a walk, if you can avoid it, and here is why. A walk has silences in it and a sixteen year old will fill a silence with what he thinks you might be about to say.

Something with an object in it. Throw something back and forth. Move something. Anything where hands are occupied and there is an obvious thing to look at that is not each other.

And the content of the talking for those ten minutes is the thing in your hands. That is all. Comment on the throw, not on the thrower. Talk about the car, the neighbor, absolutely anything that is not him.

What he will receive from that is not an apology. It is better than an apology. It is ten minutes of being in his father's company with no evaluation happening anywhere, which is the direct opposite of Thursday, delivered in the same currency.

You have a way to minister grace to him without one word about it, and Ephesians 4:29 has never once made the ministering depend on the subject being named. The Spirit of God is the one who does the repairing in a household, and the verse aims the whole thing at what reaches the hearer.

Then do it again next week. That is the repair.