Not Many Fathers

Rapzilla reported this week that Hulvey’s Could Be Tonight won the Dove Award for Rap/Hip Hop Album of the Year. A hip hop album about faith now holds one of Christian music’s top honors. Every young person who grew up on this culture should hear that, because for a lot of them the culture did more raising than any man in the house.

Picture a man and a sixteen-year-old in a parked car outside a group home, radio low.

“You know all the words to this?”

“I know the words to everything. That’s who raised me.”

“Who?”

He points at the speaker. “Them. They was there every day.”

The man lets it sit. “Any of them ever come to court with you?”

The young man laughs. Then he stops.

Paul wrote to a church in Corinth that had plenty of voices and very few fathers.

For though ye have ten thousand instructers in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers: for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel. (1 Corinthians 4:15, KJV)

The word behind “instructers” is paidagogos. In a Greek household he was usually a slave who walked a boy to school, carried his things and corrected his manners. Useful. Sometimes loved. His job ended when the boy came of age. A father’s never does.

A good song can be a paidagogos. It can walk a kid right up to the door of faith, and that is worth celebrating this week. A song cannot sit in the plastic chairs on visiting day.

Most of us men will not say this out loud: instructing is easier. Advice costs a minute. Presence costs what Paul gave the Thessalonians, “our own souls” (1 Thessalonians 2:8). So we become instructors to our own sons. We text the right verse. We pay for the camp. We give the speech in the car and call it fathering. Then the phone comes out at dinner, because sitting in a boy’s silence wakes up our own father’s silence, and the mind will do almost anything to avoid a wound it never let God touch. The man who swore he would never be his father rarely repeats the yelling. He repeats the leaving, in small doses. Late at the office. Half listening. Distance feels like control. It is fear.

Look where Paul says fatherhood comes from: “in Christ Jesus… through the gospel.” He is not bragging about technique. A man found by God can beget life in someone else. The Father did not mail us instructions from a distance; he sent his Son into the room. On the cross the Son prayed the forsaken cry of Psalm 22, so that the Spirit could put “Abba” in the mouth of every abandoned child who trusts him (Galatians 4:6). You do not need a good father behind you to become one. You need the Father who adopted you, and the Spirit who puts the habit of hiding to death.

Our systems are full of instructors. A young person in detention can have a probation officer, a case manager, a lawyer and a program, and still not one man who will be around in five years. A court can assign a caseworker. Nobody can assign a father. That gap gets filled by men who choose it.

The album is called Could Be Tonight. For some boy in your life, the night he decides whether anyone is really staying could be tonight. Put the phone in the other room. Be there when he walks in.