I Am Not The Parent I Thought I Would Be

There was a version of you who was going to do this differently.

She was calmer. Or he was more present, or funnier, or the kind of parent who is on the floor at the end of the day rather than at the sink with their back to the room.

You did not write any of it down and you were never asked to sign anything. But it was there, before any of this started, and you have been quietly comparing against it for about nine years.

And the worst part is that the imagined version has never had a bad night. Never been ill, never had the week you had in March, never had this particular child on this particular Tuesday.

I am not going to tell you who to become. That is a standard and this site does not hand those out, and there is already one running in your head that you did not choose.

And I am not going to tell you that you are that parent really. You would not believe it and it would be a stranger insisting on something about a house they have never stood in.

Remember ye not the former things

There is a sentence in Isaiah that tells a nation to stop looking at something, and the something is unexpected.

Remember ye not the former things, neither consider the things of old. Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? (Isaiah 43:18, King James Version)

Remember ye not the former things.

That is strange, because the chapters before it are full of God telling them to remember. Remember the Red Sea. Remember what was done for you. And now, remember not.

What changed is that the remembering had become a comparison. They were looking at an old rescue and measuring the current situation against it and finding the present thin.

You are being told to stop looking at an old picture, and that instruction has never once been a rebuke about your memory. Isaiah 43:18 says remember ye not the former things, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a living room where somebody has been comparing for nine years.

And then the reason. Behold, I will do a new thing.

Not a better version of the old thing. Not the old thing finally arriving on time. A new thing, which by definition will not match the picture anybody was holding.

You have a new thing being done rather than an old plan arriving late, and it has never once been required to match your picture. It is written in Isaiah 43:18 that God does a new thing that springs forth, and the Spirit of God is the one who does something that was never in anybody's expectation.

The imagined parent is not a person

Now let me be exact about the thing on the other side of that comparison, because it is not a person and it cannot be caught.

The parent you imagined has no body. No tiredness, no bad back, no month where somebody was ill. She was assembled before any of the actual conditions existed, and she has never once been tested by any of them.

That is why the comparison never comes out well. It is not close and it is not fair and it was never going to be, because one side of it is a construct and the other side is a Tuesday.

Isaiah 43:18 removes the old picture rather than helping anybody match it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an opponent off the board.

You are not losing to a person, and a construct has never once had to survive a single evening in your house. Isaiah 43:18 tells people to stop considering the things of old, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an unbeatable opponent off the board entirely.

And here is the plain thing, because nine years of this has become a settled fact.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about the parent sitting on that rug.

It is a comparison between something real and something that was assembled in advance, and those have never once been comparable.

You have not fallen short of anything, and an imagined version has never once been a standard God set. The written word cancels the old picture in Isaiah 43:18 rather than measuring against it, and the Spirit of God is the one who declines to hold anybody to a construct.

Shall ye not know it

One more thing, because there is a question at the end of the verse and it is doing something.

Now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it?

That question is not rhetorical decoration. It is asking whether they will recognize the new thing when it arrives, and the implication is that they might not, because it will not look like the old one.

Which is the specific trap here. A person holding a detailed picture of what a good parent looks like will not recognize the actual good thing happening in their house, because it is arriving in a different shape.

You are living beside something good that does not match the picture, and it has never once been required to match in order to be real. It is written in Isaiah 43:18 that the new thing springs forth, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes it visible to somebody who was watching for a different shape.

Isaiah 43:18 warns that a new thing can be missed by somebody watching for an old one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the actual thing visible.

You are able to see what is actually happening in that house, and it has never once been required to look like the picture in order to count. Isaiah 43:18 asks shall ye not know it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a real thing recognizable to somebody watching for a different one.