I Wanted To Be The One Who Goes

Five forty in the morning, and the lot is full of people who are not going anywhere except back to bed.

The van is loaded. There is always one bag too many and there is always a conversation about it. Somebody's mother has brought coffee in a box, which is a thing that only happens at this hour. Two of the team are absurdly awake and three of them are not.

And he is the one who checked the tire pressures last night and who will drive them the ninety minutes to the airport and drive home again alone in the light.

He has done this eleven times.

He is forty-nine. When he was twenty he was going to go. Not vaguely. He had a country in mind and a language he had started on and a folder with things in it, and if you had told him then that he would be forty-nine and standing in a parking lot with a box of coffee he would not have believed you.

Then his father got sick, which was the first reason, and it was the right reason.

And then there was work, and then there was a wife, and then there were three children and one of them needed more than the others, and every single one of those was the right reason at the time and is still the right reason now. He would not undo any of it and he means that.

But he is going to drive back from that airport in about three hours with the sun coming up, alone, as he has done eleven times, and there is a specific stretch of that road where the thing arrives, and he has never told a living soul about that stretch of road.

Where this is not going

Let me say it up front, because you are standing in the cold and you deserve straightness.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is nothing at the bottom that names the real assignment and expects you to feel better about the road home. That would be a page telling a man what he is, and this site does not do it.

And it is not going to tell you that staying was secretly the harder and better calling. That is a compliment given in place of an answer, and you have heard it, and it did not touch the stretch of road.

And it is not going to tell you that your turn is coming. Nobody knows that.

You are not being consoled here, and there is no trade being offered. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one instruction from Paul, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man reconciled to a substitute before He would speak to him.

As God hath distributed, so let him walk

Here is the sentence, and it sits in the middle of a passage about ordinary circumstances.

But as God hath distributed to every man, as the Lord hath called every one, so let him walk.1 Corinthians 7:17

Paul is writing to people who were all asking whether they should change their circumstances now that they belonged to Christ. Should the married change, should the slave change, should the one who was called in one situation move to another.

And his answer, repeated three times in that chapter, is about the same shape: God distributed, God called, walk in that.

The word distributed is worth sitting with at five forty in the morning. It is a word about something handed out deliberately, in portions, to particular people.

Which means the life you are standing in is not the residue of a life you failed to get. It is a portion, and a portion has a giver.

You are walking in something that was distributed to you deliberately rather than left to you by default, and Scripture uses the language of a giver handing out portions. I am not stretching that. 1 Corinthians 7:17 has God as the one who distributed and called, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man in a cold parking lot at five forty.

And the reasons were real

Now something worth saying, because you have been circling it for years without settling it.

Your father was actually sick. Your child actually needed more. Those were not excuses and they were not failures of nerve and you have never once told yourself they were.

But somewhere in there a quiet arithmetic started, in which the sum of a lot of right decisions became a life you had not chosen, and that arithmetic has never had anywhere to go, because there is no one to be angry with. Not your father. Not your wife. Not your child, God forbid. Not God, particularly, because the reasons were real.

A grief with nobody to blame is the hardest kind to carry, because there is no legitimate place to set it down and every attempt to raise it sounds like an accusation of somebody who does not deserve one.

You have not been resentful for twenty-nine years, you have been carrying a grief that has never had a legitimate place to be put down. The word is full of people bringing God things that have no villain in them, and the Spirit who searches all things has been on that stretch of road with you eleven times.

Handing it over, precisely

Here is the action, and it has to be exact, because the careless version of this is an insult to a man who has given up something real.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it.

It is not deciding it will never happen. You are forty-nine.

It is not deciding that staying is your calling and being pleased about it. Nobody here is telling you what you are for.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, in your own voice, and putting it in His hands rather than carrying it alone on that road for another eleven trips.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture never asks a man to stop wanting a thing before he can hand it over. The word puts the distributing in God's hands and leaves the man walking, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to be content first.