The Apology He Wrote on the Walk Home

The train gets in at 6:41 and the walk home is twelve minutes, and he has been using those twelve minutes for a while now to work on something.

It is an apology. It is for God. And it is, by this point, very good.

It has an opening that concedes the whole thing straight away, so that nobody has to be the one to bring it up. It has a middle that explains without excusing, which is the part he is proudest of, because he found the line between those two somewhere around the mailboxes on Fourth Street and he has kept it there ever since. It has a close that asks for nothing, because asking for something would cheapen it.

He revises as he walks. Under the railroad bridge tonight he cuts a sentence that was doing too much work on his own behalf.

Past the hardware store with the shutters down, he tries a different order and puts it back the way it was.

At the corner where the hedge comes out too far he gets to the part he has never been able to finish, which is the part where he says what he actually wants, and he lets it go again the way he always does, because it is not ready.

Then his own gate. The light is on over the door. His wife has the radio on in the kitchen and something is in the oven.

The speech goes back in the pocket for tomorrow. It has never once been said out loud.

That is you, with the whole thing worked out and not a word of it delivered, still a hundred yards short of the gate you have been walking toward for a long time.

The speech is honest work, and it is not the door

I want to start by honoring that speech, because most people skip straight past it and I am not going to.

That speech is not vanity. A man does not spend twelve minutes a night for that long on something he does not care about. It is careful the way its author is careful. It concedes early because there is no dodging in the man who wrote it. It refuses to whine because it was made by somebody with a sense of what is fitting. Every draft has been an act of respect toward God, and I would not have anybody think for one second that it was wasted.

Here is the only trouble with it. Somewhere along the way it stopped being a thing you were going to say and became a thing you had to finish first, and a speech that has to be finished first is a gate, and you built it yourself, out of good material, in the dark, on a road that never had a gate on it.

You are not standing at a barrier tonight, and the one you can see was never His. I am not softening anything; that is what is written in the fifteenth of Luke, and it is the Holy Spirit who is walking you toward the plain truth of it now rather than leaving you to draft your way there.

He was already down the road

Read the verse slowly, and watch the order of the actions, because the order is the entire gospel of this category.

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. Not at the gate. Not close enough for anybody to hear a word. Whatever that son had prepared, and he had prepared something, none of it had reached his father's ears when the compassion moved and the running started.

And the father runs, which in that culture, for a man of that standing, meant gathering up his robe in front of the whole village and going at a pace no dignified man went at. The welcome cost him his dignity in public and he spent it without hesitating, before he had heard a syllable of explanation.

You have a Father who is already on the road, and He started before the first line and not after it. That is Luke 15 as it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been pressing this on you for some time, on a walk you thought you were taking alone.

Now hold the two pictures together. You, in the dark, polishing. Him, at a run, closing the distance. You have been working on the terms of a meeting that was already being conceded by the other party. His word puts it in that exact order, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old parable land like news at 6:41 on a Tuesday.

The father interrupts

Here is what happens to the speech, and it is my favorite thing in the whole passage.

The son gets it out. Part of it. He says the honest part, the part about not being worthy to be called a son, and then he comes to the line he has been building toward, the arrangement he wants, make me as one of thy hired servants.

And the father is not listening to that. He talks straight over him to the servants. The best robe. The ring. The shoes. Kill the fatted calf. The son never gets to deliver his proposal, and nobody ever tells him what was wrong with it, and it never comes up again for the rest of the story.

That is not rudeness. That is a father who has no use for terms because he was never negotiating.

You have a welcome that is not waiting on your closing paragraph, and it has no clause in it for you to satisfy. It is written that the father ran while the son was still far off, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is the one who has kept you walking toward the gate all this while instead of turning around.

So the speech does not need to be finished. It needs to be put down.