Everybody Else's Sons Come Home

He has prayed for other people's children for eleven years and watched a great many of them come home, and he is glad every single time, and he goes out to his car afterward.

That is the shape of it. Somebody stands up on a Wednesday and says that their daughter has come back, or that the boy has been to a service, or that after fourteen years there has been a phone call, and the room does what that room does, and Ray is in it, and he means every word he says to them.

And then at about half past nine he is standing in this kitchen with the urns cooling, because he is always the last one out, and there is a particular quality to the ten minutes he spends drying a tray that nobody has ever seen.

His own son is thirty-one. It has been eleven years, which is to say that when it started, Ray was in this same kitchen praying for a man whose boy came home the following spring, and he has been here ever since.

He has never once said his son's name in that Wednesday meeting. Not in eleven years.

There are reasons he tells himself. That it would make people uncomfortable. That a pastor's family should not be a project for the congregation. That his wife would hate it. All of those are partly true and none of them is the reason.

The reason is that he cannot say it out loud in a room where everybody else's has been answered, because saying it would make visible a thing he has managed for eleven years not to look at directly, which is that he does not know why his has not been.

If you have watched everybody else's arrive, hear the question. Who did you think was doing the going out?

The shepherd does not send anybody

What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?Luke 15:4

The first thing to see is who does the going, because the whole parable hangs on it and it is the thing a pastor will read straight past.

Doth not leave the ninety and nine... and go after. The shepherd goes. Personally. He does not organize a search, he does not delegate it to the flock, he does not stand at the gate and call. He walks out into the wilderness himself and he goes after that one.

Ray has spent eleven years as a man who believed the search was his to run. It is what he does for everybody else's children, professionally and sincerely, and he has quietly assumed the same structure applies to his own, with him as the one out in the wilderness.

The parable puts somebody else out there.

You are not the one who went out after him, and it is already the shepherd doing it, and He does not delegate that. I am not comforting a pastor in a kitchen. It is written in Luke 15:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a parable a man has preached a dozen times and turns it around to face him.

Until he find it

And there is a phrase at the end of that verse that Ray has preached and never once applied to his own eleven years.

Until he find it.

That is a phrase about duration, and it does not specify one. It does not say for a season, and it does not say for a reasonable period, and it does not say until the shepherd concludes it is not working. It sets an end point and the end point is finding, and everything before that is the search still being in progress.

Which reframes what eleven years is. Ray has been treating the length as data about the outcome. In the parable, length is not data about anything except how far the sheep went.

You are inside a search that runs until the finding, and it is already the stated shape of it, and nobody set a term on it. Scripture says until he find it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a written phrase about duration true through the eleventh year of a man's silence in a kitchen.

What nobody will promise him

And now the thing that must be said, because Ray would hear the omission immediately and stop trusting everything else.

Nobody is telling him his son will come home. Not next year and not eventually. That promise is not mine to make and it is not in that parable; the parable is about a shepherd's behavior and not a guaranteed schedule for any particular sheep. A person who promises you the outcome has taken a real hope and turned it into a debt God never signed.

What is being said is smaller and steadier: the search is not yours, the searcher is not tired, and the length of it is not a verdict.

You are being asked to stand rather than to produce, and the outcome is already outside your department. It is written that the shepherd goes after that which is lost, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hold hope without holding a promise nobody gave him.