Correction Yes, Holding No

He kneels every day and he has done since he was twenty, and he could describe the posture of it exactly, and the posture is the article.

He comes in braced.

Not frightened. He wants that clear and he would say it twice. He is not afraid of God and never has been, and he would tell you that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and he would mean the right thing by it.

He comes in the way a good man comes into an inspection he expects to pass but not perfectly. Ready. Attentive. Prepared to be told.

And he is told, and he takes it well, and he changes things, and over thirty years he has genuinely become a better man because of it, and there are people in his family who have benefited from every correction he has ever received.

He is fifty one.

Here is what he has never once done, and he only found the words for it in June, at a wedding of all places, watching his brother's youngest fall asleep against her father in a plastic chair with the music still going.

He has never expected to be held.

Not comforted. Held. The thing that child was doing, which involved no performance and no attention and no readiness at all, and which she did in the middle of a loud room because there was a person there whose whole business, at that moment, was that she was against him.

He watched that for about a minute and then had to look at the floor.

And the thought that came was not sad exactly. It was more like a man realizing that a door he has walked past for thirty years is a door.

You know the posture. Yours may not involve kneeling. But you know what it is to come to God ready to be told, every time, and to have never once come expecting to be simply held.

The same God does both

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an argument against the fear of God it will be false and you would reject it.

The pit is not reverence. Your reverence is right and it is not being taken off you and nothing here corrects it. The pit is that you have one expectation, and it is accurate as far as it goes, and it is not the whole of what is on offer, and thirty years of one expectation has trained a man's whole body to arrive in one posture.

Here is the verse, and it is out of a song Moses sang to a nation.

Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.Deuteronomy 32:18

Two halves in one line, and one God in both of them.

The Rock that begat thee. That is a father's word and it is a strong one, and it is entirely at home in the posture you already have.

And the second half, in the Hebrew, uses the word for a woman bringing a child to birth. That is why a good many translations render the clause as the God who gave you birth. Moses put both of those in a single sentence about a single God and saw nothing to reconcile.

Here I draw the line in the same paragraph, because on this ground the two never travel apart. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. Deuteronomy 32:18 does not make God half a father and half a mother, and it does not give Him a softer side to go with a firm one. It uses two pictures, both chosen by Him, for one God whom neither picture exhausts. He is never addressed by a title Scripture does not give Him, and the pictures stay in the form He gave them.

And notice this, because it is the whole thing for a man in your posture. The verse does not raise one half by lowering the other. It is not saying the correction was too much and here is the balance. Both are true of one God at full strength, and a man who has only ever met one of them has not met a stricter God than the real one. He has met half of Him.

Take that on your knees, and know it is not my softening, it is what is written. You are dealt with by the same God who begat you and gave you birth. Deuteronomy 32:18 has both halves in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who opens a second expectation in a man whose body has arrived braced for thirty years.