The Balloons on the Gatepost

There are two balloons tied to the gatepost, gold and white, and one of them has got itself wrapped round the latch so the gate only opens halfway.

He is on the pavement with a cake box balanced on one hand, the good one from the place on the corner, because he was not going to turn up empty handed.

Through the front window he can see most of it. His sister moving through with a stack of plates. Somebody's kid doing laps of the sofa. His mother-in-law laughing at something with her hand flat on the table the way she does. And in the middle of it, on the good chair, his brother-in-law, back, with a plate on his knee and about four people talking at him at once.

The music is the same six songs it always is at that house.

He is glad. That is the part he wants on the record, because he has gone over this and it keeps coming back true. He is genuinely glad the man is back. He has wanted it for a long time and he prayed about it, back when he still prayed about things, and now it has happened and he is standing outside it with a cake box.

He gets the gate open a bit further. He does not go through it.

What is in him is not hatred and it is not even really anger. It is arithmetic. He did the school runs. He took the calls at eleven at night. He covered the shifts nobody else would cover and he never once made a thing of it, and in all of those years nobody has ever tied a balloon to a gatepost for showing up.

Somebody inside cheers at something. He stands there with the box going soft in his hands.

You know that gate. It might be a kitchen, a phone call, a photo somebody posted. Somebody who was gone got a party, and you are glad, and you cannot get your feet to move, and the two of those living in you at once has been quietly convincing you that there is something wrong with you.

Two men went out of that house

Let me start by taking one thing off you, because it has ridden along the whole length of that street.

In the story everybody knows, the older brother is usually the one we are supposed to disapprove of. That reading has done a great deal of damage and I want no part of it. Look at what he actually did with his life: he stayed, he worked, he kept the whole thing running while it fell apart, and when he comes in off the field and hears music he is the only person in the story nobody thought to go and get.

And look at what the father does about him.

The father leaves his own party.

That is the detail. On the same night, out of the same house, that man goes out twice. He runs down the road for the one who came back, and later, with the food on the table and the guests in the room, he walks out again for the one standing in the yard.

Therefore came his father out, and intreated him. The word behind intreated is the one Scripture uses for calling someone alongside, pleading with them, comforting them. He does not summon the boy in. He goes out and begs.

You have a Father who comes out of His own house for you, and He has never once thought of you as the difficult one. That is not my sympathy talking; Luke 15:28 puts the father outside twice in one evening, and the Holy Spirit is the one out on the pavement with you now, in the halfway open gate, doing exactly what that verse says the father does.

The arithmetic is right, and it is in the wrong book

Now the thing that will actually move your feet, and it is not what people usually reach for here.

Nobody is going to tell you your figures are wrong. They are not wrong. You did do the school runs. You did take the calls. Everything on your side of the page is accurate and it was witnessed by God, and if anybody tries to comfort you by suggesting the figures are overstated, do not believe them.

The trouble is not accuracy. The trouble is which book it is written in.

Because the older brother's complaint, when it finally comes out, is a wage complaint. Lo, these many years do I serve thee, and thou never gavest me a kid. Serve. Gave. That is the vocabulary of a man on a payroll, and the ache underneath it is the ache of somebody who has worked hard and not been paid what the work was worth.

And the father's answer does not argue with the figures at all. He changes the category. Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.

Here is that same sentence in the letter Paul wrote about who you actually are.

And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ.Romans 8:17

An heir is not paid. That is the whole of it. Nobody hands an heir a goat as a bonus for a good year, because the herd is already his, and the field is already his, and the house with the music in it is already his, and there is no transaction in the building at all.

You are an heir, and everything the Father has is already yours, and none of it has ever been in the process of being earned. Romans 8:17 says that in writing about you, and the Holy Spirit is named in that same chapter as the one who bears witness that you are a child of God, which means the sonship is not something you are hoping to be granted at the end of a good enough run. It is the standing you were already in on the field.

A blessing instead of a verdict

So here is the small hard thing I am going to ask you to do, and here is what I am not asking.

I am not asking you to feel differently. Feelings are not the toll on this gate and they never have been. You can walk up that path with the whole arithmetic still live in your chest and it will not make the walk fraudulent.

What I am asking is for one sentence, and for it to be a blessing rather than a verdict.

Say his name. Out loud, once. Then say one thing over him that wants good for him. It will be short. It may be dry as a stick. It does not have to be felt to be real.

And here is why it is a blessing and not a verdict. A verdict is a thing you deliver from outside. It keeps you at the gate by definition, because somebody has to stand out there to hand it down. A blessing is a thing you say from inside the family, about family, and the moment it is out of your mouth you are standing where the person who said it stands.

You have the standing to bless him tonight, and it is standing you were born into and not standing you are working toward. Romans 8 says heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a dry, unfelt, four-word blessing and treats it as the real thing, because with Him it is.