The One Who Has Not Come Home

An engine comes up the hill at twenty to one in the morning and changes gear.

She is awake before she has decided to be awake. That is the thing nobody warns you about. Her body knows the sound of a car slowing before her mind has caught up, and she is already sitting on the edge of the mattress with her feet on the carpet, listening, in the exact posture of a woman about to be given something.

The car goes past the gate. Carries on. The sound thins out and turns the corner at the top and is gone.

She lies back down.

Nine years she has been doing this. She could not tell you when it became automatic. Some nights she does not even properly wake up, she just surfaces, listens, and goes back under, and in the morning there is nothing to report because nothing happened, which is what has happened every night for nine years.

Here is the part she does not say to anybody.

The people who used to ask have stopped asking. Not unkindly. They ran out of ways to ask it, and she got very good at the light voice, the one she uses at church and in the shop: oh, he is doing all right, you know how it is. And she has begun to suspect that her praying has become a habit rather than a hope, a thing her mouth does at the sink out of muscle memory, and that somewhere around year three heaven quietly stopped taking the calls.

And under that, at the bottom of everything, the sentence she has never once said out loud to another human being: it was me. Somewhere in there, it was me.

Now I want to stop, because you have not been reading about her for a while.

You know the sound of that engine. Maybe it is a phone that lights up at an odd hour, or a name at the top of a message you have not opened yet, or the two seconds after somebody says his name in front of you and the whole room decides not to look at you. You know exactly how many years. You could tell me in months.

Beloved, sit down here with me. I have got something to show you and it is not a technique.

Somebody has been out on that road every evening

You know the story of the son who went. Everybody knows it, and everybody knows the running, and almost nobody notices the line that makes the running possible.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

A great way off.

Hear what that means about where the father was standing. You do not see a person a great way off from an armchair. You do not see them from the back of the house. To spot somebody at that distance you have to be outside, at the end of the property, looking down the road, and you have to be looking at the moment they appear, which means you were looking the moment before, and the evening before, and the evening before that.

The famous thing in that story is the running. The quiet thing is the years of an empty road.

That father was out there every evening of a wait that had no news in it. Every evening the road stayed empty. Every evening he went back in and ate his supper and slept and got up and went out again, and the story does not tell us how long, because the story is not interested in the length. It is interested in the fact that somebody was watching an empty road on purpose.

That is your God, and He is not in your armchair either.

He is out on the road your child is on, right now, at this hour, tonight, in whatever city and whatever situation you are afraid to picture in detail. He has better eyes than you and He is closer to them than you have been in years, and He is not passing the time until He is ready to act. He is watching, which is not the same as waiting, because watching is something love does with its whole attention.

Now let me take two things off you, because you have been carrying them and they were never yours.

The first is the verdict. The years are not a judgement on your praying. Nobody in heaven has been holding out for a better version of your prayer, and there is no wording you have failed to find. The prayer you said at the sink out of muscle memory was heard the same as the ones you sobbed in the first year. You have not been doing this wrong.

The second is the other verdict, the one you say to yourself at twenty to one. It was me. Beloved, look at me. Even in that famous story the father did nothing wrong, and the son went anyway, because he was a person and people go. Whatever you would do differently, and there is always something, it does not have the power you have given it. A grown person's road belongs to them. You did not build it and you cannot walk it for them.

And the waiting is not silence.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?Psalm 56:8

Nine years of nights nobody knows about, and every single one of them is written down. Not forgotten, not lost, not filed away as unanswered. Kept.