What We Had When I Was Nine

Every summer of your childhood, your family went to the same place for a week.

You could describe the room. You know what it smelled like in the morning. You know exactly what the drive was and what your father said at the point where you could first see the water.

And your children have never had anything like that, and you have decided that this is the thing you have failed at.

Nobody told you it was the standard. You set it yourself, quietly, probably around the time your first child turned five, and you have been marking this family against it ever since.

And here is the part I want to press on, because it is where the whole thing turns.

You are not comparing your children's childhood to your childhood. You are comparing it to your memory of your childhood, which is a different object entirely. It is edited, it is thirty years old, and it is doing something that no actual week can do, which is standing in for everything good that ever happened to you before you were twelve.

That is not a standard. That is a feeling with a location attached to it.

Say not thou, What is the cause

There is a verse in Ecclesiastes about exactly this, and it is unusually blunt, which is why I like it.

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost inquire foolishly concerning this matter. (Ecclesiastes 7:10, King James Version)

You have a warning in the written word aimed directly at that comparison, and no memory of a better summer has ever once been solid enough to measure a family against. Ecclesiastes 7:10 calls the inquiry itself foolish rather than answering the question, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a man without making him feel stupid for having asked it.

Notice what it does. It does not say the former days were not better. It does not argue the point at all. It says the question is badly formed, and that asking it is inquiring foolishly.

That is a strong thing for Scripture to say. The verse refuses the comparison rather than losing it.

You are able to refuse a comparison instead of trying to win it, and refusing it has never once meant those summers did not matter. It is written that a man asking why the former days were better inquires foolishly concerning the matter, which is why nobody has to prove anything about your childhood, and the Spirit of God is what closes a question that has been open for years.

And there is a reason the question is badly formed, which the verse does not explain and which experience does. You cannot compare a remembered week to a lived one. The remembered week has no boredom in it, no argument on the Wednesday, and no adult worrying about anything, because you were nine and could not see any of that.

Your father almost certainly had a version of your worry going on in the front seat.

You are able to put down a comparison that was never between two comparable things, and thirty years of holding it has never once made it accurate. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man permission to stop measuring, and Ecclesiastes 7 refuses the whole inquiry rather than settling it.

What you are actually trying to give

Now the useful part, and it is a question worth four quiet minutes.

So what is the thing actually being reproduced here?

Because I would bet it is not the place. If somebody offered you that exact week in that exact room with your own children, my guess is you would find it slightly disappointing, and that you already suspect that.

What you are trying to give them is a specific feeling you had at nine: that everything was arranged, that the adults were happy, that nothing was going to be asked of you for a week.

You are able to name what you have actually been chasing, and naming it has never once made the years you have already given them smaller. The Spirit of God is what gets a man underneath his own motive without shaming him for it, and Ecclesiastes 7:10 goes at the shape of the question rather than at the man asking.

And here is the hard and freeing fact. That feeling cannot be given directly. It was a by product. Your parents were not producing it. They were driving a car and arguing about money and hoping the weather held, and the feeling happened to you anyway, in the back seat, without anybody aiming it.

Which means your children are almost certainly getting their own version of it right now, from something you have not noticed and would not have chosen.

You have children forming their own version of this out of something ordinary in your house, and none of it has ever once depended on you reproducing anything. It is written that the inquiry into the former days is foolishly made, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at work in a child's memory in the middle of an unremarkable Tuesday.

Ask an adult what they remember from being nine and it is almost never the holiday. It is a smell in a kitchen, a particular chair, somebody's laugh, one specific walk. None of it was designed.

Name one thing and put it down

So here is the assignment, and it is more of a release than a task.

Name the one thing from your own childhood that has been acting as the standard. Then put it down.

Name it specifically. Out loud or on paper. A week somewhere. The same place every year. A certain kind of summer. Whatever the actual shape of the thing is that you have been failing to provide.

You are able to say the specific thing out loud and let go of it, and letting go has never once been you giving up on your own children. Ecclesiastes 7:10 refuses the comparison outright, and the Spirit of God is with a man saying a true sentence about his own childhood at a kitchen table.

Then put it down. Which practically means: stop measuring against it. Not stop loving it. It was good and it is yours and nobody is asking you to think less of it.

Put down its office. It has been acting as the standard for this household, and it was never appointed to that.

And here is what fills the space, which is the reason this is not a loss. Once that week is not the target any more, the ordinary things you do become the thing rather than a substitute for the thing. And the ordinary things are where their memory is being made anyway, whether or not you are counting them.

You are able to let the ordinary things be the thing itself, and they have never once been the substitute you have been treating them as. Ecclesiastes 7 calls the comparison to the former days a foolish inquiry, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man see his own Tuesday as the real thing.