We Only Ever Face A Screen

You and your sons do spend time together. That is what makes this hard to name.

Most evenings the three of you are in the same room. There is something on. Sometimes it is a match, sometimes it is a series, sometimes it is a thing one of them wants to show you on a phone and you lean over to see.

And you have told yourself, more than once and not dishonestly, that this counts. It does count. It is not nothing.

But you noticed something last week and it has stayed with you.

Every single one of those hours has the three of you facing the same direction, at the same rectangle, with the talking happening in the gaps.

You have not stood shoulder to shoulder with either of them, moving, with nothing in front of you, in a very long time. You could not put a month on it.

And when you think back to your own father, almost nothing you remember from him came at a table or facing him across a room. It came walking somewhere. It came in a car. It came while the two of you were doing a job with your hands and neither of you was looking at the other one.

That is the thing that has gone missing here. Not time. The direction of the bodies.

When thou walkest by the way

There is a well known verse about teaching your children, and the part everybody quotes is the beginning, and the part that matters here is the middle.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 6:7, King James Version)

Sitting in the house, walking by the way, lying down, rising up.

Four settings, and only one of them is the one modern households have kept. We have the sitting in the house. We have a great deal of the sitting in the house. The walking by the way has quietly disappeared out of the list without anybody deciding to remove it.

You have a household that kept one of the four settings and lost another, and the written word has never once treated the walking as the optional one. Deuteronomy 6:7 names the road alongside the house as a place where the real talking happens, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary road into that kind of place.

You have felt the difference without having a name for it. Things get said on a road that do not get said in a room, and the reason is not spiritual mystery, it is geometry.

Facing somebody is an interview. Standing beside somebody is company.

When a boy of sixteen is looked at directly and asked a real question, everything in him organizes itself into an answer that can be safely given. When the same boy is walking beside you, looking at a road, with his hands in his pockets and his face pointed away, the guard comes down, because nobody is watching his face while he thinks.

You are able to change what gets said in this family by changing where the bodies are pointed, and that has never once required you to become a different kind of father. The Spirit of God is the one who opens a young man up on a road at dusk, and Deuteronomy 6:7 puts the talking of the things of God squarely in the walking as well as in the sitting.

This is not a criticism of the screen. I am not going to tell you to throw it out, and the article that told you to would be lying about what your evenings can actually carry.

I am telling you that one of the four settings has been left empty, and that it is the one where fathers and sons have always talked.

Ten minutes of the road

Here is the practical shape, and it is smaller than you think.

Do not move the evening. Move ten minutes of it.

You are not being asked to give up the thing your family already does, and it has never once been necessary to end one habit in order to add a small one. It is written that a father talks with his children when he sits in the house and when he walks by the way, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes room in an evening that already looks full.

Whatever is on, pause it. Do not turn it off, because turning it off is a statement and a statement invites a debate. Pause it.

Then say: walk to the end of the road with me, we will be back before this starts again.

That sentence does two things. It says how long, which removes the fear that this is the beginning of a campaign. And it promises the return, which means nothing is being taken from anybody.

Take one of them, not both. Two is company; three is an audience, and the boy who is being watched by his brother says nothing worth hearing.

You were given a road outside this house that costs nothing and belongs to no schedule, and it has never once required booking or arranging. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with two men walking in the dark, and Deuteronomy 6:7 puts the way alongside the house as a place where a family talks.

And then, and this is the whole discipline of it, do not use the ten minutes.

Do not use it for anything

Here is where most fathers ruin this, and I have watched it happen more than once.

You get him on the road, and you have ten minutes, and there is a subject you have been carrying for a month.

You are not required to make this walk productive, and its worth has never once depended on any particular subject coming up. It is written that the talking happens by the way, and the Holy Spirit is the one who decides what surfaces in ten minutes on a road, which is not a job you were given.

And so you begin, gently, four minutes in, with the question you actually came out here to ask.

He will feel the turn happen. He will feel that the walk had a purpose and that he was the purpose, and he will file this, and the next time you say come to the end of the road he will already know what it is for and he will not come.

The reason a road works is that it is genuinely about nothing. The moment it becomes a delivery mechanism for a conversation, it stops being a road and becomes an office with weather.

So talk about the match. Talk about the neighbor's car. Say nothing at all for a hundred meters and let that be comfortable.

You have permission to walk beside your son for ten minutes and produce nothing, and that has never once been a wasted evening in the reckoning of God. The Spirit of God is the one who does the work in a silence between two people, and Deuteronomy 6:7 counts the walking itself among the things a father does with his children.

Do this until it is unremarkable. That is the goal, and it is a low one, and it is the right one.