I Have Thought About Their Face All Day

You have had it with you since about eight o'clock.

Not the shouting. The face. The half second where it changed, before they arranged it into something else, and you saw it and then it was gone and the door was shut and you were in the car.

And you have been carrying that around all day, through a meeting or a shift or a supermarket, and it has been sitting just under everything.

I am going to be careful here in two directions, because articles about this usually go wrong in one of them.

I am not going to minimize it. I am not going to say all parents shout and it is fine, because that is not what you are asking, and being told it is nothing when you know what you saw does not help.

And I am not going to catastrophize it either. You did not do irreparable damage this morning. That sentence is being said to you all day by something inside your own head, and it is not accurate, and it has no interest in accuracy.

And this line, plainly. If you are frightened of your own anger, or you think you might hurt somebody, or there is a violence in it that goes past a raised voice, that is not something to manage privately. Talk to your doctor or a qualified professional where you live this week, and if a child is at risk tell somebody today. That is the right thing and it is not a defeat.

He knoweth our frame

There is a line in Psalm 103 that I have never been able to read quickly, and the reason is what it says about God's expectations.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust. (Psalm 103:13-14, King James Version)

He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.

Frame is a construction word. What we are built out of, what the material can bear, what it does under load.

And He remembers it. Which means He is not working from an idea of you that you keep failing to be. He knows the actual specification, and the specification includes a person who is tired and short and who has been managing four things at once since six in the morning.

That is not permission and it is not an excuse. He is not saying it did not matter. He is saying He was not surprised, and there is an enormous difference between those two, and the second one is where you can put your feet.

Psalm 103:14 has God working from what a person is actually made of, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach somebody at four in the afternoon still holding a face from eight.

You are known right down to what you are built from, and He has never once been surprised by you. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a floor rather than an excuse.

The apology is smaller than you think

Now the practical part, and the mistake almost everybody makes with it.

You are going to want to explain. It will come out as: I am sorry I shouted, I had a really difficult morning and you were not listening and I had asked you three times. Psalm 103:14 has God knowing the frame without a submission from anybody, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting on your account of the morning either.

Every word after sorry is you asking a child to take on a share of it. They cannot. They are not able to hold your reasons, and what they hear is that the shouting was partly about something they did, which puts it back on them.

Psalm 103:14 has God knowing the frame without the person having to submit an explanation, and the Holy Spirit is not requiring a defense from anybody today.

So make it small. I am sorry I shouted this morning. That was not okay and it was not your fault. Then stop.

And then let it be over. Do not bring it up again this evening, do not bring it up on Saturday, and do not carry a slightly gentler version of yourself around for three days as a penance. A child who is apologized to twice starts to think the thing was much bigger than they realized.

You are able to say it once and let it close, and the repair has never once needed to be as large as the guilt. The written word has God knowing what we are made of without asking anybody to account for it, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person say four sentences and stop.

You are not the day's evidence

One more thing, because this is where the real damage happens.

You have taken this morning and made it a piece of evidence in a case you have been building for years. That you are the kind of parent who does this. That they will remember you like that.

Psalm 103:14 describes what a person is made of rather than issuing a verdict on them, and the Holy Spirit is not the prosecutor in that case.

A child's picture of a parent is not built out of the worst forty seconds. It is built out of about eleven thousand ordinary hours, and the fact that you have carried a face around all day is itself part of the record, and it is a part they will never see and will feel every day.

You are not the worst forty seconds of a Tuesday, and one morning has never once been the case against you. Psalm 103:14 works from the material a person is made of rather than from a single failure, and the Spirit of God is the one who dismisses a case somebody has been building against themselves.