Anyone who has watched a documentary on elephants will have seen something remarkable. An old matriarch, sometimes limping, sometimes half-blind, sometimes leading her herd toward water sources only she seems to remember from decades past, is never pushed aside for a younger, stronger cow to take over. The herd stays close to her. They wait for her. When she finally dies, the others have been documented standing over her body for days, touching her with their trunks, reluctant to leave.
Her weakness never disqualified her from being honoured. Her position did that, long before her performance ever entered the conversation.
That’s worth sitting with, because it’s precisely the tension many of us carry quietly about our own parents — people we love, and who shaped us, and who, if we’re honest, also got a great deal wrong.
What God Actually Commanded
The fifth of the Ten Commandments is remarkably short, and remarkably unconditional:
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the LORD your God is giving you.” — Exodus 20:12, NKJV
Notice what’s missing. No footnote. No asterisk reading “honour your parents, provided they were good ones.” No clause excusing you if your father drank too much, or your mother favoured a sibling, or either of them wounded you in ways you’re still unpacking in your forties. God, who certainly knew every flawed parent who would ever live, chose not to attach a single qualifying condition to this command.
Compare that carefully with what Paul writes to children in the New Testament:
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.” — Ephesians 6:1, NKJV
“In the Lord.” There’s the boundary — but notice precisely where Paul places it. The qualifier sits on obedience, not on honour. A child is never required to obey a parent’s instruction to sin; obedience has a ceiling, and that ceiling is God’s own law. But honour was never given that same exit clause anywhere in Scripture. You can, and sometimes must, decline to obey a command. You are never released from the posture of honour toward the one who gave it.
Ham, and the Two Brothers Who Walked Backward
Scripture doesn’t shy away from showing us flawed parents. Noah, the very man God preserved through the flood, gets drunk shortly after and lies uncovered in his tent (Genesis 9:20-21). Not exactly his finest hour. What happens next is instructive:
“And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside. But Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and went backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned away, and they did not see their father’s nakedness.” — Genesis 9:22-23, NKJV
Ham’s failure wasn’t that Noah had a flaw — Noah’s flaw was simply a fact by then. Ham’s failure was what he did with that flaw: he exposed it, made it public, turned his father’s shame into a story for others. Shem and Japheth, walking in backward so they wouldn’t even have to look, covered what could have been covered. Same flawed father. Two entirely different responses. One dishonoured a real weakness. Two honoured a real man, without ever pretending the weakness wasn’t real.
There’s an Igbo proverb that captures something similar: a child does not teach his mother. It doesn’t mean the mother is always right. It simply recognises that the relationship carries a weight the child doesn’t get to casually override, no matter how much wiser he later becomes.
A Story Worth Sitting With
I knew a man whose father had been a hard, often absent figure — quick with his hands, slow with his affection, the kind of father many grown children quietly decide to simply stop calling. When his father grew old and frail, this man had every reasonable excuse to keep his distance. Instead, he began visiting weekly, sitting with him, making sure his medications were filled, his meals were cooked. He never pretended the past hadn’t happened. He didn’t hand his father a fresh apology on his father’s behalf, or rewrite the story into something softer than it was. When his father tried to justify the old harshness one afternoon, the son gently but firmly said, “I’m not here to relitigate that. I’m here because you’re my father.” He honoured the position. He never once pretended the man had earned it through good behaviour.
That, I think, is the whole tension resolved in a single sentence.
What Honour Is Not
Let me be plain here, because this subject deserves plainness, not vague comfort. Honour is not the same as obedience to sin, proximity to danger, or silence about real harm. A child instructed to lie, steal, or participate in wrongdoing is not honouring a parent by complying — Ephesians 6:1’s “in the Lord” settles that. An adult who has survived genuine abuse is not commanded by this passage to remain in physical danger, nor to pretend the abuse didn’t happen.
Honour can, when necessary, be expressed from a careful distance — refusing to slander, refusing to seek revenge, praying for the parent’s heart, not repaying evil for evil (Romans 12:17-19) — even while wisely protecting yourself from further harm. Covering a father’s nakedness, as Shem and Japheth did, is not the same instruction as standing inside a burning house.
What honour forbids is contempt. Mockery. Dismissiveness. Treating the relationship as though it no longer carries any weight simply because the parent failed to earn your admiration. That posture — regardless of how understandable the hurt behind it might be — is the one thing Scripture never gives us permission for.
Five Questions Worth Sitting With
1. Is there a parent I’ve quietly written off, not through wisdom, but through resentment?
2. Do I confuse “honour” with “agreement” — assuming I owe respect only where I also owe approval?
3. Have I ever exposed a parent’s weakness to others the way Ham exposed Noah’s, rather than covering it the way Shem and Japheth did?
4. Am I honouring my parents’ position even in seasons I can’t honour their decisions?
5. What would it cost me, this week, to offer one deliberate act of honour to a parent I’ve struggled with?
Final Word
The elephant herd doesn’t wait for the matriarch to be flawless before it stays near her. It stays near her because of who she is to them, not because of a perfect record she’s maintained. God asked something similar of us — not blind obedience to every instruction, and never silence in the face of real harm, but a steady, deliberate honour that doesn’t wait for agreement to arrive first.
It’s a hard command precisely because it was never meant for easy parents. One day, in the Kingdom of God being prepared for those who endure, every unresolved ache between parent and child will finally be set right by the only Judge fit to weigh it rightly.
Until then, honour where you can, protect yourself where you must, and leave the rest — gently, deliberately — in hands more capable than yours.
If this touched a nerve — if honouring a difficult parent, or anyone else you’ve found hard to love, feels like more than a short blog post can equip you for — I’ve written a fuller book on exactly this struggle. How to Love Those Hard to Love walks through what genuine, Scripture-rooted love looks like when affection doesn’t come naturally and the person in question hasn’t made it easy. You can find it at oludareakinbo.com/my-books.
