I Used To Know What My Grandchildren Wanted

You used to be able to do this in your sleep.

With your own children you never once had to think about it. You knew before they said anything. You knew in October what the answer was, and you were right, and it was not a skill you were aware of having.

Now there are these ones, and you look at them across a room, and you have no idea.

Not a vague idea. None. You could not tell anybody what the nine year old is into, and you could not honestly say what the older one does with herself when she is not at that screen, and you have been in the same room with both of them a dozen times.

So you have drawn the obvious conclusion, which is that something has gone out of you. That the world moved and you did not, and that this is what being left behind looks like from the inside.

Sit down a minute, because I want to show you what actually happened, and it has nothing to do with you being finished.

Be thou diligent to know

There is a proverb about a man and his animals that turns out to be about people.

Be thou diligent to know the state of thy flocks, and look well to thy herds. (Proverbs 27:23, King James Version)

Be diligent to know. Look well.

Those are not descriptions of a gift. They are instructions for work, given to somebody who could have assumed he already knew, because he owned the animals and saw them every day of his life.

You have been treating knowing as a thing a man either has or has lost, and Proverbs 27:23 hands it out as a diligence instead, to be done on purpose and done again. The Holy Spirit is the one who put an instruction there rather than a compliment, and an instruction is something a man can still obey at seventy.

Now look at the second verb, because it is the one that fits you.

Look well. Not glance. Not be present in the room while other things happen. Look well, which is a deliberate slow attention aimed at one animal at a time.

A shepherd with three hundred sheep did not know them by having a feeling. He walked among them and he looked, over and over, for years.

You are being asked for something you can actually do, and it is written that a man is to look well to his herds rather than to trust that he already knows them. The Spirit of God is the one who makes looking work, and looking has never once required a man to be young.

And there is a mercy hidden in the fact that this needed saying at all.

The verse exists because knowing fades. If it did not fade, nobody would have needed to be told to be diligent about it. The proverb assumes the drift and gives the answer in the same breath.

You have not been failing at something everybody else finds automatic, and the written word takes the fading for granted before it says one word about what to do. The Holy Spirit is the one who put the fading and the fix in a single sentence, which is not how somebody writes to a man he is disappointed in.

You knew your own because you were in the house

Here is what really happened with your children, and it is going to sound almost too plain.

You lived with them.

There at breakfast and at bedtime and in the car and in the hallway at eleven at night. You heard a thousand throwaway sentences a week without ever trying to. You watched what they picked up and put down. Nobody told you any of it and you never sat down and studied any of it.

That was not a knack. That was proximity, running quietly for eighteen years.

You were never doing it by instinct at all, and Proverbs 27:23 puts the knowing on the far side of diligence rather than on the near side of talent. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a man see his own past honestly, and honestly is kinder here than the story you have been telling.

Now count the hours you get with these ones.

Six visits a year. Some meals. A drive. A room with four other adults in it and a television on and everybody talking.

That is not a relationship failing. That is a fraction of the input, producing a fraction of the knowledge, exactly as it would for anybody alive.

You are getting the results the hours would give any man, and it is written that the state of the flock is known by looking well rather than by loving them enough. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes a wrong verdict off a man, and He is taking that one off you now.

So the fix is not to become somebody else. The fix is to get some of the hours back, in the only form available to you, which is one at a time and on purpose.

You have a way back in that costs nothing, and Scripture asks for diligence and a long look rather than for the eighteen years to be handed back. The Spirit of God is the one who makes a single deliberate hour do what a thousand accidental ones used to.

What being left behind is not

I want to go at the left behind thought directly, because it is doing damage and it is built on one wrong step.

The step is this. Not knowing them equals the world moving without you.

But keeping up with anything had nothing to do with knowing your own children. That knowing came from standing next to them. The keeping up was never part of it, not once, not for a single one of the eighteen years.

Which means that whatever has happened here, being left behind by the world is not it.

You have not been overtaken by anything, and Proverbs 27:23 measures a man by whether he looks well rather than by whether he can name what is on a screen. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man what he is actually short of, and it is hours rather than relevance.

And here is the part that most needs saying to a man your age.

They do not want you to be current. There is nobody in that house who needs another person who knows what they know. What is not available to them anywhere else is a man with time who sits down and asks and is genuinely interested in the answer.

That is rarer at nine years old than you can possibly imagine.

You have the one thing that house is short of, and it is written that looking well is the work rather than knowing everything the flock knows. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an unhurried grown up the most unusual thing in a child's week.

And that unhurried hour is the whole method. There is nothing else in it.

You are one sat down conversation from knowing something true about that child, and the written word puts diligence at the front of it rather than cleverness. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps what a nine year old says on a porch step, and He does not lose it between now and the time it is needed.