Now You Watch the Road

At the start of this book I told you that you couldn’t name the day you stopped.

I’ve got a different question for you now, and it’s the last one.

How long had that old man been looking down that road?

Because he saw him while he was still a long way off. That’s the detail everything in this book hangs on and we’ve come back to it four times. Nobody sent word. There was no letter. A man rehearsing an apology does not announce himself.

Which means the only way that reunion happens is if the father had been checking the horizon. Not once. Not on a hunch. Every day, for years, on the chance that today was the day a familiar shape came over the rise.

Nobody told him a date. He didn’t have one. He just kept looking.

Now I want you to notice something about that man that took me twenty-five years to see, and it changes the whole ending.

He had never been to the far country.

He knew that road from one end. He’d watched a boy walk out on it and he’d stood at the near end of it hoping, but he had never spent a night in a pig field. He didn’t know what the pods smelled like. He’d never worked for a man who wouldn’t feed him or stood in a foreign market with no money and nobody who knew his name.

He was watching for a shape he loved.

You’d know more than that.

You would know, at a distance, from the walk. You’d know it before the face resolved, because you know what it looks like when a man is coming back with a speech in his mouth. You know the particular way somebody carries himself when he has already decided what he’s worth and is bracing to say it out loud.

You know because you walked it.

So here’s where this book has been going, and I think you’ve felt it coming since about chapter seventeen.

Somebody is on that road right now.

Not a category of person. Somebody. You wrote their name down two chapters ago and you knew it immediately and you’ve been carefully not thinking about them since.

Right now, tonight, they are doing exactly what you did. They’re doing the arithmetic in the dark. They are drafting the terms, and setting their own price low enough that it can’t be refused, and rehearsing a version of I’m not looking to get involved in anything, I just want to be all right.

And they will not tell anybody. They will not send word ahead. They’ll do the whole thing silently, the same way you did, for years if necessary.

The only way anybody sees them coming is if somebody is watching that road.

Now I know the objection, because it’s the true one and it’s the reason you assume nobody was ever watching yours.

Everybody who used to is dead.

Somebody watched your road once. You may not have thought about it in this exact way, but somebody did.

Your mother did. For years, probably. The pastor who knew your name when you were nine. A Sunday school teacher who bought you a Bible with your name stamped on the front and never once mentioned it again. An old man at the end of a pew who asked about you every single week for a decade and you never knew he did.

Most of them are gone now. Some of them died still watching, and never got to see one thing come of it.

I’m not going to make that smaller than it is. It’s one of the real griefs of being our age and nobody names it. You cannot go back to the room, not because the room turned you away, but because every person in it who knew who you were at twenty-six is in the ground. Whatever’s meeting there now is full of strangers, and being a stranger in the one place you were once known is worse than staying home.

That is a genuine loss. Sit in it if you need to.

But there’s a second thing in it, and I’d be doing you a disservice not to say it out loud.

The post is open.

Somebody stood that post for you, for years, unpaid and unthanked, and did not live to see the day. And the thing about that work is that the person being watched never sees it happening. You didn’t. Not once. You had no idea anybody was at that window, and that is the exact nature of the job.

Which means you already know how to do it. It was done for you for thirty years by somebody who is not here to be thanked.

You’re not the first person to stand out here in the dark looking at a road. You’re just the one who’s still alive.

Now here’s the part I could not have written when I started this, and it’s the reason the older brother chapter comes right before the end.

I’m still in the yard. I told you that and it’s still true, sixty years old next month, twenty years out, no Sunday on the calendar and none planned.

But I’ve noticed something out here that I could not see from inside, and I’ve spent a long time getting to it.

You can see the road from the yard.

Inside, at the party, in the noise and the light, nobody is looking out the window. Nobody in that house saw the boy coming. Not the servants, not the brother, not one guest.

The father saw him because the father was outside.

And the older brother, standing in that field in the dark, furious, was standing in the one place on the property with a clear view of the road.

The thing you have been treating as your exile is the vantage point.

I don’t know what to do with that except tell you. I’m not going to build a doctrine on it and I’m not going to tell you it means you should stay out here. I have no idea whether you should. I don’t know that about myself.

I’m telling you that where you’re standing has a view, and that the view is of a road, and that there is somebody on it.

So let me say the thing this whole book has been for, as plainly as I know how.

Coming home is opening up a place in your heart to God and godly things.

That’s it. That’s the definition and it’s the only one I’ll offer. It does not require a building, a membership, a Sunday, an explanation, or a single other human being’s approval. You can do it tonight in a truck. Some of you already did around chapter four and have been quietly not evaluating it for six weeks, which was the assignment.

And once there’s a place open, the second thing happens, and it’s the answer to the question you brought in here.

You asked what somebody your age has left to give.

Here it is. You are the one who runs.

Not the one who teaches. Not the one with the position or the title or the platform, and not the one who has it figured out, because you don’t and neither do I. The one who sees a shape on the road and recognizes it, and doesn’t wait for it to reach the door, and goes out.

That’s the job. You are extraordinarily qualified for it. You have been in training for it for twenty years and you thought you were just wasting time.

Here’s your last move, and it’s the smallest one in the book.

Go stand where they can see you.

That’s all.

Not so you can say anything. You don’t need a speech and you’d probably get it wrong, and this is not the kind of thing that gets fixed with the right sentence.

Just be visible. Be a person who is findable, at a known place, with a known phone number, who does not flinch.

Go to the same diner on the same morning. Answer the phone at eleven at night. Sit in the same seat at the ballgame. Be the one in this town who is known to have been through it and known to be all right, so that when somebody’s life comes apart at two in the morning in eight months, there is one name they can think of.

You cannot make the life event happen. That’s not yours and it never was.

You can be standing in range when it does.

The parable ends with a man in a field in the dark and a father in front of him and no resolution. Jesus told it to a room full of older brothers and left the last page blank so they’d have to write it themselves.

I don’t have mine written either. I want to be honest with you all the way to the end, because I promised that in the first chapter and it’s the only thing I’ve had to offer the whole way through.

But I know what I’m doing while I work on it.

There’s a road out there.

Somebody’s on it. They’re a long way off yet, and they’ve got something rehearsed, and they are absolutely certain that nobody is watching.

They’re wrong about that part.

Go stand where they can see you.