The Years I Was Away

You came back on a Tuesday, which nobody knows, because you came to a midweek thing on purpose so that fewer people would see you arrive.

That was two years ago and you have been every week since.

You have not told anybody the shape of the years before it. Some of them could guess and one or two of them have, and nobody has asked, and you have been grateful for that and also faintly disappointed by it in a way you have not examined.

And here is the thing that has not shifted in two years.

You believe there is a record.

Not vaguely. You have a fairly specific picture of it, and in the picture the years you were away are near the top, and anything that happens now gets read against them. You do not think God is angry. You think He is fair, and that fairness means the years are on file, and that a person with those years on file is somebody who receives second.

It is not despair. It is closer to accountancy.

Now, before we go one word further.

I am not correcting you.

The years were what they were and I am not going to minimize them or explain them away, and I am also not going to treat coming back as something that needs justifying. You came back. That is a fact and it happened on a Tuesday.

I am saying I know about the file. That is all.

He ran

Here is the moment in the story that everybody has heard and almost nobody slows down for.

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

Look at the sequence and count what has happened before any speech takes place.

The father sees him. A great way off, which means he was watching the road, which means he had been watching the road for a long time.

He has compassion. Before a word.

He runs. An older man in that culture running is an undignified thing and Jesus put it in deliberately.

He falls on his neck and kisses him.

And only then, after all of that, does the son get his prepared speech out, and the father does not respond to it at all. He talks straight past it to the servants about a robe and a ring.

The speech, which is the part the son rehearsed all the way home, turns out to be the only thing in the scene that does not matter.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, walking back up that lane.

You were met before you got there. Not one day, not once the two years become five, not when the file thins out. Right now, on a Tuesday two years in, you are standing inside a scene where the running happened while the son was still a great way off. That is not my kindness. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real person on a real evening.

Now the plain thing, and there is no clause after it.

The years are not why.

Not why anything is slow. Not why the thing quietly asked about since that Tuesday has not moved. There is no queue where people with cleaner records stand ahead of you, and I am not going to say something careful about consequences, because consequences are already well understood in this house and this is not that conversation.

Coming back with a history is not a lesser return. Jesus told the story with the history intact and did not have the father mention it once.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have been run at rather than assessed, and the running happened at the far end of the road rather than at the gate. The word says when he was yet a great way off, which is a phrase about distance being covered from the other direction, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real lane at a real hour of the evening.

The file you have been keeping is yours. It is not held anywhere else and it never has been.