Before I Fix The One Thing

There is a turning off the county road about three miles from the house you grew up in, and you know exactly where it is, and you have driven past it more times than you could count.

Not once, sitting there. Past it. At speed, with the radio on, looking straight ahead like a man with somewhere to be.

Two years now. Two Novembers, two Christmases, one funeral you heard about afterward from a cousin.

And it is not that you do not want to go. That is what people get wrong about you, and it is why you stopped explaining. You want to go so badly that you have planned it, at night, lying on a mattress in a rented room over a garage on the wrong side of the county, going through it step by step. Which shirt. What you would say first. Where you would park so the truck was not the first thing anybody saw.

The plan has always had one condition in front of it.

Before I fix the one thing.

Before the job is steady. Before the money is paid back. Before a full year is behind you instead of eleven months. Before the shake in your hands is gone by evening as well as by morning. Before you can walk up that drive and hand somebody a reason to be glad, instead of walking up it as the reason nobody sleeps.

It seemed reasonable the first month. It seemed like respect. A man does not turn up at his father's door with nothing in his hands.

But the one thing did not get fixed in a month, and the condition did not expire, and somewhere in the second year it stopped being a plan and became a wall with your own name in the mortar. Now you are three miles out with a shirt hanging ready on the back of the door and no date on the calendar.

And the worst of it is what happens when you drive past the turning. You do the arithmetic. You tell yourself: not this month, but soon, and I am closer than I was.

Then you get back to the room and take your boots off and you know the truth of it.

The distance has not moved in two years. Only the excuse has.

The order is the entire gospel

You have been three miles out for two years, and the thing keeping you there is not the one thing. Luke 15:20 says the father saw his son while he was still a great way off and ran at him, and the Holy Spirit is standing in the room with you tonight while that verse gets read over a turning you keep driving past.

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 where the running starts, because that is the whole argument. Not at the door. Not at the gate. Not after an inspection of the shirt, the shake, the story, or the reason. A great way off. Which is to say: at three miles, in the state he was actually in, smelling of where he had been.

And notice what the son did not get to do. He had a speech. He had worked on it in a field, the way a man works on a sentence he is dreading, and it was a good speech, and he never got to finish it. There is something in the running that outran the qualifying.

Now the order, and this is the piece that has to go in the right sequence or it does damage. The rescue comes first and the repair comes after. Both are real. Nobody here is telling you the one thing does not matter or that it stays as it is. What is being said is where the fixing happens: it happens on the inside of that door, at a table, with people who already have their arms around you, and it never once happened out on the road as the price of admission. His word tells the story in that order deliberately, and the Spirit of God is not going to let you reverse it tonight.

You have been trying to arrive already mended so the mending would not have to be witnessed. That is not humility, though it wears the coat well. It is a man trying to hand God a finished job. It is written into Luke 15 that the ring and the coat and the meal came before anything got repaired, and the Spirit who is teaching you this is not asking for a better version of you at the door.

And hear the other half of it plainly, because a man can take this and get it lopsided. You were welcomed at a distance; you were not pronounced finished at a distance, and those are two different sentences. Luke 15 hands the son a ring and a coat before it hands him one word about the pigs, and the Spirit of God works in that same order inside a man who lets Him through the door.

And one plain thing, said flat out, because it matters more than anything else here. If two years alone in a rented room has taken you as far as thinking about ending your life, or about simply not waking up, then tell one living person tonight. Out loud. A friend, a doctor, a crisis line. In the United States, call or text 988 and somebody answers. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line will do the same. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make you a burden to anybody. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.