> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.humanacre.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Reckoning - URL: https://www.humanacre.com/the-reckoning/ - Published: 2026-09-05T09:06:29.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-05T09:06:29.000Z - Author: Niall Maxwell *Fear, fatherhood and the hiddenness of God* All my children are away from me. There are different histories behind those distances, and I could explain each one differently. I could speak of circumstances, relationships, borders, decisions made by other people. Some of that would be true. But beneath the complexity is another truth: I was full of anger and rage. I was manipulative. I was disloyal. I frightened people I loved. There was no God in me then, or if there was, I could not reach Him through the fear. This is difficult to admit without qualification. The separation from my children is not simply something that happened to me. Whatever else occurred, I helped to create the conditions of my own exile. My anger entered rooms before I did. People learned to anticipate it. Love became entangled with vigilance. Those closest to me had to consider which version of me they were going to meet. Every morning, I say the Our Father. At the end, I add the words Christians have spoken for centuries: *For Thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory.* Some mornings they rise naturally. On others, they catch in my throat. If the Kingdom is His, and the power is His, and the glory is His, why does He not fill the human heart with them? Why must we go searching for what could apparently be given? Why are we permitted to become so governed by fear that we destroy the very things through which God has tried to reach us? Why does He so often become apparent only afterwards? After the words have been spoken. After the door has closed. After the child has been taken somewhere beyond your daily reach. After fear has completed its work and called itself protection. The answer usually offered is free will. God does not compel us toward goodness because compelled love would not be love. But this has never entirely satisfied me. What is free about a will already colonised by fear? What is free about a nervous system that learned its responses long before the conscious mind could understand them? We speak as if every person stands before good and evil in perfect freedom, calmly choosing one or the other. That is not how fear works. Fear narrows the world until the act that damages everything can feel, for one catastrophic moment, like the only act available. That does not make me innocent. Explanation is not acquittal. But the question remains. If grace is real, why is it so easily concealed? Why must some of us tear through the lives of others before we discover what has been tearing through us? At its worst, creation can feel like a coliseum. God, or gods, watching from somewhere beyond the visible world while we fumble, grapple, wound one another, collapse, rise and repeat the spectacle. We provide the drama. The blood is ours. And still we are expected to praise Him for His Kingdom, His power and His glory. There are days when this feels cruel. Not merely the things we do to one another, but the hiddenness of the power that might have prevented them. God could make Himself apparent. He could interrupt. He could enter the frightened heart before it mistakes control for love, aggression for strength or manipulation for need. Yet so often He does not, and afterwards we are told that the devastation may become the ground of transformation. What of those who had to become the ground? I have to be careful here. Theology can become another instrument of manipulation. I could turn my accusation against God into a defence of myself, as if divine silence made my actions inevitable. It did not. My children did not experience a theological problem. They experienced me. They lived inside weather I helped to create. Whatever fear was moving through me, they encountered its consequences. That is where the reckoning must remain. People speak of love as if it were a reward for becoming sufficiently wise, healed or spiritual. That has not been my experience. Love arrives before we are ready. It entrusts us with what we do not yet know how to hold. Love gave me children, and their presence revealed the distance between the father I imagined myself to be and the man I actually was. Love gave me brothers, then stood beside me at a graveside. Love gave me women whose presence opened parts of my heart I did not know existed, then exposed how much fear still lived beside them. The cost of love is not only the grief I have endured. That is too flattering a version of the story. Sometimes other people have paid the cost of my inability to love them without fear. Some wounds are not mine to romanticise as evidence of how deeply I have lived. They are wounds carried by others because of me. Nor can reckoning become a performance of self-hatred. Self-condemnation can preserve the ego as effectively as self-justification. It keeps the offender at the centre of the story, now as a tragic figure crushed by remorse. It asks to be comforted for finally recognising the pain that everyone else already knew was there. Repentance must mean something more demanding. It must mean becoming trustworthy without requiring recognition for the work. It must mean learning to remain present when shame demands escape, and becoming a man whose presence does not require others to brace themselves. It must include the possibility that forgiveness may not come, that relationships may not be restored, and that the people I love may need distances I cannot argue them out of. I cannot make transformation into a bargain with my children: if I become good enough, they must return. That would only be manipulation in a holier form. I can become different because different is what love requires of me now. The outcome is not mine to command. This is the true cost of love. Not that loving makes us vulnerable to loss, though it does. The deeper cost is that love eventually removes every convincing story we have told about ourselves. It shows us what we protected, what we demanded and who paid for our fear. Then it asks whether we are willing to relinquish the person we became in order to survive, even when there is no guarantee that doing so will restore what was lost. I continue to say the Our Father. I do not always know whether I am praying, protesting or placing God under accusation. Perhaps all three are present. I still do not understand why He permits fear to grow so powerful in the human heart, or why His presence can remain hidden until after the damage is done. *For Thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory.* I say it because I no longer know whether I am praising God or holding Him to His word. And perhaps He is holding me to mine.