He Showed It by Working and I Needed Him in the House

My father was a bartender in a casino and he worked nights, and I want to say something about him before I say anything else.

He was not a bad man. He was not cold in the way people mean when they say cold. He worked those hours for a specific reason, which is that there was a house and there were three of us in it and the hours paid better.

He loved me. I know that now with a certainty I did not have at twenty, and I have gone over the evidence enough times that I could argue it in front of a judge.

And I never heard it. Not once, not on any occasion, not on a birthday, not at a hospital, not at the end.

Those two facts have to sit in the same sentence or the sentence is not true. He loved me, and he never said it, and he showed it in a way that required him to be somewhere else while he was showing it.

There is a line in John's letter about the manner of love, and the word he picks is the one that finally gave me somewhere to put this.

The word is about kind, not quantity

Here is the verse.

Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God. (1 John 3:1, King James Version)

What manner of love. The phrase in the Greek is closer to: what country is this from. It is a word about strangeness, about something being of an unfamiliar kind rather than an unfamiliar size.

That distinction is the whole article for somebody in my position. I was not short of evidence of love. I had a house and shoes and a table with food on it and a man who did not sleep properly for twenty years to keep those three things in place.

What I did not have was the kind of love that occupies a room. And for a long time I thought that meant I had to choose: either he loved me, in which case I should stop wanting the other thing, or the other thing mattered, in which case he did not.

John's word means I do not have to run that argument. There are kinds. They are not interchangeable. And the one being described in that verse is of a kind nobody has grown up inside.

You are being handed a love of an unfamiliar kind rather than a larger amount of a familiar one. 1 John 3:1 says what manner of love, which is a word about kind and not about quantity. It is the same Spirit, Romans 5:5 shedding the love of God abroad in our hearts, who delivers a kind a person has no experience of.

What the psalm says is at the address

If the missing thing is presence rather than provision, the Psalms name presence directly and put something specific there.

Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore. (Psalm 16:11)

In thy presence is fulness of joy. Not in His provision. Not in His arrangements. In His presence, which is the exact category that was missing from a house with a man at work in it.

And notice fulness, which is a word about there being no shortfall. The psalm is not offering compensation for something. It is naming the place where the thing itself is kept.

I do not say that lightly and I am not going to pretend it swaps one for the other on a Tuesday. What I will say is that when I finally started praying about presence rather than about provision, something changed in the praying that had not changed in twenty years of asking for other things.

You have presence named as the place the fulness is, rather than as a substitute for it. Psalm 16:11 says in thy presence is fulness of joy. It is the Spirit of God, John 14:16 given as another Comforter to abide with you for ever, who is named as the abiding.

The promise God makes to a man who asks for exactly this

There is an exchange in Exodus where Moses asks for one thing above everything else, and it is not a strategy or an outcome.

And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest. (Exodus 33:14)

He had asked. Read the verses around it: Moses says plainly that if God's presence does not go with them, he does not want to be sent at all, and that provision without presence is not what he came for.

And God does not correct him for asking. He grants it, in one sentence, and attaches rest to it.

For a man who had a house full of provision and an empty room, that exchange is not abstract. Somebody asked for the presence specifically, said that the arrangements were not enough, and was told yes.

You are allowed to ask for the presence rather than for more of the arrangements. Exodus 33:14 says my presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest, and it is His Spirit, John 14:16 abiding with us for ever, who is how that promise is kept now.

The father in the parable says both halves

And there is one sentence in the parable of the two sons that puts provision and presence in the same line, deliberately.

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. (Luke 15:31)

Thou art ever with me. That is the presence half, and it comes first.

All that I have is thine. That is the provision half, and it comes second.

The elder brother in that story had the second and did not know he had the first, which is a very specific kind of poverty and is exactly what a well provided house with nobody in it produces.

The father does not choose between them and he does not rank one over the other. He states both, in one sentence, to a man standing in a yard who had spent his whole life working.

You have both halves stated in the same sentence rather than one traded for the other. Luke 15:31 says thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine. It is the Holy Spirit, Galatians 4:6 sent into the heart crying Abba, who is named as what makes the first half something a person can feel.