Nobody Showed Me How This Is Done

Other people appear to know things.

Not big things. Small ones. What you say when a child comes into the room upset and does not want to say why. How long you leave it. Whether you go after them or wait.

They seem to have a setting for it, and they use it without thinking, and you stand in a doorway running an internal calculation and getting nowhere, and then doing something and worrying about it for two days.

And underneath that is a fact you rarely say out loud, which is that nobody ever did any of this for you.

There was no version of it in your house. Not a bad version. An absence. And you cannot copy an absence, so every ordinary situation has to be worked out from first principles at speed while somebody small is looking at you.

I am not going to give you a model to follow. That is a standard and this site does not hand those out, and being handed one when you already feel behind would only add a second thing to fail.

When my father and my mother forsake me

There is a line in Psalm 27 that says the hardest thing in the Psalms without any drama in it at all.

When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up. (Psalm 27:10, King James Version)

When. Not if. David writes it as a case that occurs rather than as something unthinkable.

That matters, because most of the talking about family in religious settings assumes a working one. This verse does not. It puts the failure in the sentence plainly and then keeps going.

You are named in that verse rather than left out of it, and the absence in your own house has never once put you outside Scripture. Psalm 27:10 says when my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a doorway where somebody is trying to work out what to say.

And then the second half, which is the load bearing one. Then the LORD will take me up.

Take me up is a physical picture. It is what somebody does with a child who cannot get up on their own. It is not advice and it is not instruction. It is somebody being picked up by somebody bigger.

You have been taken up by God Himself, and none of that has ever been a replacement arrangement or a second best one. It is written in Psalm 27:10 that the LORD takes up what a father and mother did not, and the Spirit of God is the one who is doing that in a person who is grown and still needs it.

Not having a template is not the same as not knowing

Now let me say something that will be difficult to accept and is true anyway.

The people who look like they have a setting for it mostly do not. Almost every one of them is also improvising, and the ones with a template are often running one that does not fit the child in front of them and cannot tell.

Not having a pattern is a real disadvantage in one way and a real freedom in another, and the freedom is not a consolation prize.

You are looking at the actual child rather than at an instruction, and that has never once been the lesser way of doing it. It is written in Psalm 27:10 that God takes up what was not given, and the Spirit of God is the one who turns a missing pattern into a pair of open eyes.

You have to look at the actual child rather than at the instruction. That is slower, it is more tiring, and it is also the thing that everybody with a strong template struggles most to do.

Psalm 27:10 replaces a pattern with a person rather than with a better pattern, and the Holy Spirit is the one who teaches a person in the room instead of handing them a manual.

You are being taught in the doorway itself, and none of that has ever required a childhood you did not get. Psalm 27:10 puts God in the position the template was meant to fill, and the Holy Spirit is the one who instructs in real time rather than in advance.

And here is the plain thing, because this has become a verdict somewhere along the way.

That is not a verdict. It is not a score, it is not a grade, and it is not evidence about the parent standing in that doorway.

It is a person doing an unfamiliar job without having watched anybody do it, which is difficult, and which is not the same as doing it badly.

You have not been disqualified by what you did not get, and an absence in your own childhood has never once been a mark against your parenting. The written word writes the forsaking straight into Psalm 27:10 and answers it, and the Spirit of God is the one who refuses to read a gap as a defect.

What to do with the doorway

One practical thing, and it is not a method because it does not tell you what to do.

Standing in a doorway not knowing is allowed to be visible. It is fine to say, I do not know what you need right now, tell me if you work it out. It is fine to say, I am going to sit here for a bit.

Those sentences are not failures of parenting. They are honest, and a child who watches an adult be honest about not knowing learns something that no confident performance would have taught them.

Psalm 27:10 has a man writing down his own family's failure in the middle of a psalm about confidence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that kind of honesty into strength rather than exposure.

You are able to not know out loud, and that has never once cost you authority in your own house. Psalm 27:10 names the hard fact plainly and keeps its confidence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a sentence that admits something in a doorway.