The Letter in the Coat Pocket

He wrote the first draft of it at this table, in the winter, with the heater going and the yard dark by half past four.

It is not a long letter. Front of one page and about a third of the back. He wrote it because he is not a man who says things well out of nowhere and he knows it about himself, and this was going to be the most important thing he ever said, so he was going to get it right first.

He has rewritten it more times than he would tell anybody. The middle is good now. The middle says the true things in the order they happened and it does not make excuses, and he is quietly proud of the middle. The end is fine.

It is the first line. The first line has been written and crossed out and written again more ways than there are ways, and none of them is the one. Every version is either too much or not enough. He has read it aloud to an empty kitchen and heard it land wrong and folded it up again.

It lives in the inside pocket of his coat. It went through lambing in that pocket. It went through haymaking and it got rained on in September and dried out flat and creased. Sometimes at the end of the day he sits at this table and takes it out and reads it and changes one word.

He is not stalling. That is what he would want you to understand. He is not putting it off out of laziness or out of pride. He simply will not go until he can say it right, because saying it wrong would be worse than not saying it, and the first line is not right yet.

The coat is on the back of the door. The letter is in the coat.

You know exactly what is in that pocket, and there may be no paper in yours at all. But you have the whole thing worked out, and you have not said any of it, and you are waiting on a first line that has never once come out the way you need it to.

Every draft raises the bar

Let me say the true thing about the letter first, because most people get told the wrong one.

The letter is not a fault in you. It is the work of a careful person who did not want to be careless about the biggest thing in his life, and that is not a flaw, whatever a brisker man might tell you. So nobody here is going to call you a coward for carrying it. You wrote it out of respect.

But here is the mechanism, and I have watched it in enough people to be sure of it. A draft that is nearly right raises the standard the next draft has to clear. Then that one raises it again. The letter improves, steadily, and the bar it has to get over rises faster than the letter does, and the gap between them is the reason it is still in the pocket. The better you make it, the further off the day gets.

You are not being held at a distance by a first line, and no sentence you have ever written or failed to write has that kind of power over the door. That is not encouragement I am inventing. Scripture says the welcome came from the father's side of the field, Luke 15:20, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept you turning that letter over all this while, not as a torment but because He intends you to arrive, letter or no letter.

Read the order, not the story

Most people know this story too well to read it. So read the verbs in the order they come, slowly, as though you had never heard it.

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

Saw. Had compassion. Ran. Fell on his neck. Kissed him. Five verbs, all of them the father's, all of them finished before the boy opened his mouth. The son is still a great way off. The speech is still folded up inside him. And every single thing that mattered has already happened to him at a distance he did not close himself.

Then the boy gets his line out, and watch what the father does with it. He does not answer it. He turns to the servants and starts calling for the robe and the ring and the shoes. Not one word of assessment. He does not say it was a good apology and he does not say it was a poor one. The speech simply never becomes the subject, because the father was never running toward a speech.

You are received before your explanation and entirely apart from the quality of it, and there is nobody at that gate marking your first line. I am not putting a kind gloss on the text; that is the order the text is written in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been walking you up this lane, a great way off, while the paper was still in your pocket.

The last mile is not yours to walk

Now the part I want you to take out to the yard with you.

A man who has been away does not have to wait for a fair day to come back to his own house. Weather is not a condition of entry. And a man does not stand at the end of his own lane waiting until he can announce himself properly, because the house is not a place that admits people on the strength of their announcements.

The letter was written to close the last mile. That is what it is for. It is the thing you were going to hand over so that the distance would be accounted for and the welcome would be legitimate and nobody, least of all you, could say you had come home cheap.

You have already been brought near, and the last mile was closed from the other end while you were still working on the opening. Scripture puts it in one line, that you who were once far off have been made near by the blood of Christ, Ephesians 2:13, and the Holy Spirit is the one holding that line steady in front of you now, in the kitchen, with the coat on the back of the door.

You may keep the letter. Nobody is asking you to burn it or to feel foolish about it. It is simply not the ticket. It never was.