Passing In The Hallway

The hallway is not wide enough for two men to pass without one of them turning, and they both turn, and neither of them says anything.

Half past seven in the evening. The fridge door closes somewhere behind them, which is the daughter, who is going to take a plate upstairs and is not going to be part of this. The hall light is the one with the bulb that has been going for two weeks and nobody has changed, so the whole thing happens in a light that is slightly too orange.

His son is twenty six. He is home for a few days, which is what they call it, and the few days have a shape now that everybody understands: he arrives, and there is one good evening, and then there is this.

They turn their shoulders. Two men who look extremely alike doing the same movement, one going up and one coming down, at the exact same moment, with about four inches between them.

And the father thinks, with total clarity, the thing he thinks every time: if he says something I will say something.

And it is entirely possible, though he will not know this for another eleven years, that four inches away his son is thinking a sentence with the same shape.

Neither of them says anything. The son goes up. The father goes into the kitchen and stands there for a second not doing anything, then opens a cupboard because standing there not doing anything is worse.

That is you, and your hallway might be a landing, a car, a Sunday phone call where you both do the weather, a marriage in which two people have been waiting since about March.

Before anything else, and this comes first. If the person in your version of this frightens you, hurts you, or makes you pay for existing, nothing on this page is telling you to stay in the house with them. Standing has never once meant staying somewhere unsafe. Tell one person today who can act: your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come and sit with you. Do that first.

And second, plainly: this page is not going to tell you who should speak first, is not going to send you upstairs to have a conversation tonight, and is not going to promise you that anything between you changes. It is going to take one person out of a position he was never supposed to be standing in.

Paul puts two limits on it and both of them are mercies

There is a sentence about living at peace that is famous for its first half and merciful in its second, and most of us have only ever been hit with the middle of it.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18

If it be possible. That is the first limit and it is enormous. Paul does not say it always is. He allows, in writing, in the middle of an instruction, that peace is sometimes not available, and he does not attach any blame to that.

As much as lieth in you. That is the second limit and it is the one a man in a hallway needs. Your side. Your part. The four inches you occupy. Not his. Not both. There is no version of this sentence in which a father is responsible for what a twenty six year old does or does not say on a staircase.

So the standard is not: fix it. The standard is not: get him talking. The standard is: as much as is in you, which is a smaller and kinder assignment than the one you have been carrying since March.

You are responsible for your four inches of that hallway and never for both sides of it. That is not a soft word for a man standing in his own kitchen: Romans 12:18 writes two limits into the instruction before it asks for anything, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a limited thing feel actually limited in a father who has been carrying the whole width of it rather than the amount of patience anybody can find at half past seven.

He is not the opponent, and neither are you

Now the thing that has quietly happened, and naming it takes some of its power away.

Nobody decided the son was the enemy. There was no moment, no declaration. What happened is that a few conversations went badly, and both men protected themselves the way people do, and the protecting needed a shape to protect against, and the only shape in the hallway was the other one.

That is how a son becomes an opposing position. Not by malice. By repetition.

And Scripture is direct about where the opponent actually is, and it is not on those stairs. The struggle is not against flesh and blood. That sentence is not a technicality; it is the removal of a person from a slot. It does not hand you a diagnosis, a method or a procedure, and nothing on this page is a technique, because anything you could perform correctly or incorrectly would put the whole weight of the outcome back on you, and it was never yours.

You have been reading your own son from a position he was never actually standing in. The written word takes flesh and blood off the list entirely, and the Spirit of God is the one who lifts a person out of a slot they were put in by two years of careful, never the father's ability to feel differently about him by Friday.

And there is one more thing, and it may be the thing you came for. You are not your own enemy in this either. Scripture nowhere makes a father the fault line of his family, and His Spirit has not been withholding anything from that house until you get the hallway right.