The Part I Miss

It is Saturday, and the kitchen is warm.

You are standing at the counter in a shirt you bought yourself, waiting on the coffee, and the light is coming in low over the sink the way it does at this hour. There is a bowl of apples, and a list stuck to the refrigerator in somebody else's handwriting with your name on one of the lines. Behind you the house is quiet in the good way, the way a house is quiet when the people in it are asleep and safe.

And you catch yourself somewhere else.

The old yard. The loading bay behind the building where you used to be, at ten past three in the morning, with the door propped open on a paint can and the cold coming in off the concrete. The radio on the shelf that only ever got one station. The chair with the tape wrapped around the arm that everybody fought over. The way Dale laughed at absolutely nothing at all, and the sound of it going up off the wall.

And it arrives with warmth. That is the part. Not with a shudder. With something that feels for a second like homesickness.

You put the mug down.

Because you know exactly what that place was. You know what it cost you and who it cost you and where you were headed, and you know that people who love you stayed up nights over it, and one of them is asleep upstairs right now.

So what is wrong with you.

You cannot say it to her. You cannot say it in the room on Tuesday, where everybody is doing so well. You cannot say it to the man who drove out at two in the morning that one time and has never once brought it up since.

I miss it sometimes.

You have been carrying that sentence around for months and there has been nowhere legal to set it down.

Six weeks out, talking about the pots

You are not the first man out of a bad place to miss it, and this is not a kind opinion somebody is offering you to be nice. Exodus 16:3 has an entire nation, six weeks clear of a country that was killing them, standing in a desert and talking out loud about the pots of meat, and the Holy Spirit saw to it that the sentence went into the book where anybody could read it.

And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.Exodus 16:3

Read it slowly. They do not say they are tired. They say they wish they had died back there, and they say it about the same country that had them under a load so heavy that Exodus 2:23 says they groaned, and cried, and the cry went up to God. Both of those things are true about one place, and nobody explains that to a man on his way out.

You have a memory that edits, and that is not a defect in your character and it is not a sign the rescue failed to take. Numbers 11:5 has them listing the fish and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions, and the whips are nowhere on that list. Scripture wrote the editing down without one word of contempt for the people doing it, and the Spirit of God is holding that page open in front of a man who has spent a week calling himself ungrateful.

One plain thing here, in ordinary words, because the after is exactly where people go back in. If the missing has turned into planning, or into thoughts of ending your life, then say so out loud to one living human being tonight, before you sleep. Your wife, your sponsor, your pastor, your doctor, whoever is nearest. In the United States, call or text 988 and a real person answers. Anywhere else, emergency services or your local crisis line does the same job. Saying it is not a failure of faith and it does not make you a burden to a single soul. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and picking up a phone is obedience, not defeat.

Now watch what God does with the complaint, because that is the whole thing.

You were carried out by somebody other than yourself, and what came out of your mouth on the way is not what decides whether the carrying holds. Exodus 16:4 says the Lord answered that speech by raining bread out of heaven on them, and the Spirit who came down with it never once asked the camp for a better attitude first.

The order in that chapter does not reverse. The complaint came first. The bread came second. Nobody in that camp qualified for breakfast by feeling the right way about the desert, and nobody has qualified that way since.

And the wilderness is not a reward. Exodus never pretends it is. It is open, it is unfurnished, the food arrives one morning at a time, and there is no date printed anywhere on the far side of it. What you are looking at from a warm kitchen is a genuinely hard stretch of road, and Psalm 107:7 says He led them forth by the right way, which is a sentence about the route and not about how the route feels underfoot. The Spirit of God is not asking you to enjoy this part yet.

The company was real too, and God is not embarrassed by that. Genesis 2:18 says out loud that it is not good for a man to be alone. What got reached for in that loading bay was a real thing God invented, served in a house that charged a terrible price for it, and the Spirit who is building a man a new table knows precisely which part of the old one still gets missed.

So the thing you have been carrying is not the missing. It is the verdict you passed on yourself the third time it happened, and a verdict like that has no right to stay in a man God went in after. It is written in Romans 8:1 that there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit put that line in front of you this morning rather than the other one.

Missing a place is not a vote to go back to it. A man can want the sound of a laugh going up off concrete at three in the morning and not want one single hour of what he was doing there, and both of those sit in the same chest without either one being a lie.