His Father Will Not Move

The house has a roof problem that has been a roof problem for four years, and Ramon's father will not leave it, and there is nothing Ramon can do.

That is not a figure of speech. There is genuinely nothing. His father is sixty-nine, of sound mind, entirely within his rights, and the arrangement he is inside is one he entered voluntarily in 2009 and has defended in every conversation since.

The arrangement involves a cousin, a second mortgage, and a set of promises that everybody but his father can see the shape of. It has cost him his savings. It is now costing him the house, slowly, in the way those things do.

Ramon has argued it twice.

The first time was 2019, at a table, with paperwork. It lasted about forty minutes and ended with his father standing up.

The second time was 2022, in a car, without paperwork, gently, which he had been told was the way to do it. It lasted about six minutes and ended with his father saying, "You think I am a fool."

They did not speak for five weeks after that one.

Now they speak every Sunday and it is warm and it is real and the subject is closed, and Ramon has not raised it in three years and does not intend to.

Here is the day it caught.

His daughter, fifteen, doing something for school about family, asked what Abuelo was like when he was young.

And Ramon said, "Stubborn."

And she said, "Is that all?"

And he sat there and realized that when he thinks about his father now, which is most days, the first word that arrives is a complaint, and that it has been that way for about four years.

You know that. There is somebody you cannot help, and you stopped trying, and somewhere in the stopping the person turned into a problem in your own head, and you did not notice it happening.

Four things, and none of them is persuasion

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to try a third time. I am not going to tell you to leave it. I do not know your father, or the cousin, or that mortgage, and I am not going to hand a man instructions about his own father from behind a screen. And I am not going to tell you he will change his mind, because I do not know that.

What I will do is read you the opening of 1 Timothy 2 and count what is actually on the list.

I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men.1 Timothy 2:1

Four things. Supplications. Prayers. Intercessions. Giving of thanks.

Now, three of those are close to each other and one is not, and the one that is not is the one that changes a man in a kitchen.

Giving of thanks is on the list of things to be made for people. Not about them once they improve. For them, in the same breath as the asking, as part of the same instruction.

You are given four ways to bring a person before God, and one of them has nothing at all to do with what needs to change in him. 1 Timothy 2:1 lists thanksgiving alongside supplication as a thing made for people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen where a man just said the word stubborn.

And notice what is not on the list. Persuasion is not there. Confrontation is not there. Neither is a plan, a document, a strategy, or a well-chosen moment.

Paul is writing about how to hold other people before God, and the entire apparatus he gives is four kinds of prayer.

You have been handed the whole of the assignment, and it does not include changing anybody's mind. It is written that supplications and prayers and intercessions and thanksgiving be made for all men, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an assigned task a relief rather than a limitation.

What the stopping did

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Stopping after two attempts was not weakness. The first ended with a man standing up and the second cost five weeks of silence, and a son who decides not to spend a third is making a judgment about a relationship, not surrendering a duty.

You are not being reproached for stopping, and Scripture never once requires a person to keep pressing a case that has been refused. Titus 3:10 has Paul telling somebody to leave off after two attempts as ordinary wisdom rather than as a failure, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a considered stop from being read as abandonment.

But here is what happened in the three years afterward, and it is the thing to see.

Because the subject is closed and the situation keeps costing, and because Ramon cannot do anything about either, his father has slowly become a case in his own mind. Not a man. A situation with a person attached to it.

And that is why stubborn was the first word available to a fifteen-year-old asking about her grandfather.

You have not stopped loving your father, and what has happened is a category slipping rather than a heart cooling. 1 Timothy 2:1 puts thanksgiving for a person on the same list as asking about them, precisely so that the person does not become the problem, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a man back out of a file and into a family.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the four years have gone somewhere heavier than frustrating, or if the Sunday calls have started to cost more than they give, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your wife, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. And if you ever believe your father is genuinely unsafe, then the ordinary thing is to call for help where you live rather than manage it alone. That is me refusing to leave you at that table by yourself.