Provide For Thine Own

The man who said it meant well and it has taken him two years to work out that it was wrong.

They were at a men's thing, and this fellow, who is genuinely good and has read a great deal, was talking about the desert fathers. About going out. About how the deepest people in the history of the faith all did the same thing, which was to remove themselves.

And then he said, to him personally, in a friendly way, over coffee: you will not get anywhere with God until you learn to withdraw.

He has thought about that sentence perhaps four hundred times.

Because his situation is this. His wife's mother lives with them and is not well. He has a son of nine who is having a hard year at school and who currently needs somebody sitting in the room at bedtime, physically in the room, not calling from the landing. And there is a daughter of fourteen who has recently started saying things at about ten at night that she will not say at any other time, and he has worked out that if he is not on the sofa at ten she does not say them.

There is no withdrawing available. There is not an hour in his week where his absence would not cost somebody something.

And so for two years he has carried the quiet certainty that whatever the deep thing is, it is not for men like him.

If somebody said that to you, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to send you anywhere.

Paul's sentence points the other way and it is not gentle

Here is a verse that is almost never read in this context, and reading it in this context settles the matter in about eight seconds.

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.1 Timothy 5:8

That is an extremely strong sentence. It is one of the strongest in the letter, and it is aimed at people who were arranging their religious lives in a way that left their own households short.

And notice the word provide. It is broader than money. It carries the sense of thinking ahead for somebody, of seeing what is coming and being there for it, and it is aimed specifically at those of his own house.

Now put that beside the advice he was given over coffee. If withdrawing is the deeper thing, and his son needs a body in the room at bedtime, then the deeper thing requires him to leave a nine year old alone in the dark in a hard year, and Paul has a phrase for that arrangement and it is not a flattering one.

Which means the choice he has been quietly grieving over for two years was never a real choice. There is no version of this where God asks a man to be less present to a household that needs him.

You are exactly where you are supposed to be, and it was already the instruction rather than the compromise. 1 Timothy 5:8 is where that sits, in a sentence aimed directly at men whose religion was costing their own house, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it that strongly is the one who takes two years of quiet grief off a man on a sofa.

The desert was never a template

Now let me be fair to the man with the coffee, because he was not making it up and there is something real in what he said.

Those people did exist. Some of them were extraordinary and the church owes them a great deal, and there is a genuine tradition of solitude running right through Scripture, and Jesus Himself went out to a solitary place more than once.

But look at the shape of it in the Gospels. He went out early and He came back. The going out was in service of the being with, and the crowds and the disciples and the house He was staying in are where the rest of the time went.

And notice something about the desert fathers that almost never gets mentioned when they are held up as a model: most of them had no dependents. That is not a criticism of them, it is a fact about their circumstances, and a pattern built by people with nobody to feed cannot be lifted onto a man with three.

There is no shortage of Scripture for his situation. It is simply that almost nobody preaches it, because a man sitting in a nine year old's bedroom does not look like anything.

You have a whole way of living with God that is already available in your own house, and it was there before anybody described the desert to you. He promised it, in the words about teaching your children when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way (Deuteronomy 6:7), and His Spirit does not put a man's household on the far side of Himself.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing in this article asks anything of the people in that house. Nobody has to be told, nobody has to accommodate anything, and nothing here should cost your wife an evening or your son a bedtime. A practice that takes something from a household that is already carrying a lot is the wrong practice.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at the edge of it because of what your week allows. Scripture settled that where God receives according to what a person actually has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by anybody's available solitude.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.