The Scoreboard in My House Had My Child's Name on It

A man I know missed a whole conversation with his daughter because he was waiting for a result.

Not her result. Hers had come in. She had told him, and it was good, and he had said the right thing.

The one he was waiting for was the one that arrived somewhere behind his eyes about four seconds later, which was the answer to a completely different question: does this mean I did it right?

He told me this at a fold out table at a school thing, and he was not confessing. He was thinking out loud, the way a man does when something has just landed. He said the worst part is that she saw him do it. She has always seen him do it. She had said, once, at about fifteen, in the flat way teenagers say the true thing, that she did not know whether he was proud of her or relieved.

I do not have children. I want to say that plainly, because a man without children should be careful in this room. But I know what it is to be the thing somebody's standing hangs on, because I was that for my mother in a much smaller way for a while, and I know exactly what it weighs, and there is a sentence of Jesus about this that most people hear the wrong way round.

The hard sentence, and who it is actually protecting

Here it is, and it stings on the first read.

He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. (Matthew 10:37, King James Version)

Everybody hears that as a demand: love God more, love your child less. And read that way it is monstrous, and no parent has ever managed it, and the ones who have tried have produced cold houses.

Read it the other way, which is the way the rest of Scripture reads. What is being forbidden is not affection. It is position. He is not asking for a smaller love. He is refusing to let a child occupy a seat that will break them.

Because a child in that seat is load bearing. They are holding up a parent's sense of themselves, and they can feel it, and they have no way to put it down, and they did not agree to it and cannot resign.

You are not being asked to love your child less, and Scripture never once asks that of anybody. Matthew 10:37 speaks about position rather than affection. It is His Spirit, Romans 5:5 shedding the love of God abroad in the heart, who supplies love rather than rationing it.

Scripture calls children a gift, not a return

If God had a problem with parents delighting in their children He hid it badly.

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. (Psalm 127:3)

An heritage. A gift given, in the same psalm that tells anxious builders to go to bed. Nothing in Scripture is embarrassed about a parent's joy.

But a heritage is a thing received, and a scoreboard is a thing produced. Those are two different relationships with the same young person, and the second one is exhausting for everybody in the house, including the parent, who never once chose it either.

Paul says the cost out loud, and it is one of the shortest instructions in the letters:

Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged. (Colossians 3:21)

Lest they be discouraged. The Greek behind that is closer to losing heart than to being told off. Paul is protecting a young person's engine, which is exactly what gets worn out in a child who is holding somebody up.

You have been given a person rather than a project, and Psalm 127 calls them a reward before anybody achieves anything. Psalm 127:3 makes them a heritage received rather than a result produced. It is the Holy Spirit, Galatians 5:22 naming longsuffering among His fruit, who supplies what a parent runs out of.

The mountain where God stopped a man's hand

There is a scene about this that is older than the gospel and harder than anything in it.

Abraham takes his son up a mountain, and at the last possible second God stops him and says something exact:

Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest God, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me. (Genesis 22:12)

Whatever else that passage is, it is a story in which God, who could have taken the boy, does not, and where the entire point is that a son was let go of and then handed straight back.

That is not a story about a father who loved his son less at the end of it. It is a story about a father who found out that the boy was not the thing holding everything up, and got to carry him down the mountain knowing it.

I think that is the closest thing in Scripture to what this actually feels like. Nobody loses a child in this. Something else comes off them.

You have permission to take the weight off a young person's shoulders without loving them any less. Genesis 22:12 has God stopping the hand and giving the boy straight back, and it is the same Spirit, Romans 8:15 who cries Abba in a person, who supplies what a parent was trying to get from a result.

And if what you have been carrying about your child has got past what one person can hold, say it to somebody and not only to a page: a doctor, a counselor, a pastor you trust, or the 988 crisis line, which answers every hour there is. Parents carry things silently for years, and there is no medal for that.

What a child hears when they are the scoreboard

Here is the thing I do know from the other side, and it is the only part of this I can speak about firsthand.

When a person is what somebody else's standing rests on, praise stops being praise. It becomes information about whether they are alright, and you learn to read their face rather than hear their words, and eventually you cannot receive a compliment from that person at all.

That is what my mother's face taught me to do, entirely by accident, and she would be horrified to read it, and it was never once malice. It was a woman who had put something down on a boy without knowing there was anything in her hands.

The verse that undoes it is one about God's regard for a person, not about performance at all:

Since thou wast precious in my sight, thou hast been honourable, and I have loved thee. (Isaiah 43:4)

Since thou wast precious. Before, not because. That is the sentence a child needs to hear from a parent and a parent needs to hear from God, and the order matters, because a parent who has it can hand it on and a parent who does not will keep trying to borrow it from a result.

You are precious before anybody produces anything, and Scripture puts that word first in the sentence on purpose. Isaiah 43:4 says since thou wast precious rather than because thou hast performed. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:16 bearing witness that we are children, who does the telling that a scoreboard cannot.