Nobody at the Barrier

The doors slide open on the noise. Names on cards held up at chest height: MR OKAFOR, KLM CREW, a hand-drawn one that says WELCOME HOME NANA with a rainbow on it. A family with two balloons and a toddler on somebody's shoulders. A man in a suit already walking toward a woman who has dropped her bag to run.

She comes through with one wheeled case and a coat over her arm, and she does not look at the barrier. That is the thing about her that nobody would notice. Everybody else coming through the doors does the same small movement, the eyes going left to right along the line of faces, hopeful, checking. She stopped doing that years ago. Not out of bitterness. Out of arithmetic. Nobody has ever been at the barrier, not at eleven when the coach came back from the trip, not at nineteen with the boxes, not at any door since, and a person learns to save herself the look.

So she walks the length of it with her eyes on the floor tiles, and she gets past the last card and the last balloon, and she is out the other side where the taxi stand is, alone in the ordinary way, and that is when the thing lands that lands every time: I worked this out a long time ago. No one is coming to get me.

And this is you. Maybe not an airport. A hospital discharge with nobody to sign you out. A school gate where you were the last one, every day, until you learned to stop looking up when the cars came. A house you moved into by yourself. Somewhere along the line you did the arithmetic and it came out at zero, and you have been making it out on your own ever since, and you are good at it, and it has cost you the look along the barrier. You have been sought and found by somebody you could not see at the barrier. That is written down and I will show you where, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it read like an arrivals hall instead of an old book.

The one thing you got wrong

Say the true thing, and say it kindly. Nobody came. That is not a story you tell yourself; that is what happened, at eleven and at nineteen and since, and noticing it was not a fault. The article is not going to tell you the barrier was full and you missed it. It was not. The people who should have been there were not there. Nobody is asking you to pretend about any of them.

But there was one line in the arithmetic that was wrong, and it is the biggest one. You concluded that no one was coming. What was true is that no one you could see was coming. Those are different sentences, and the difference is the whole of your life.

Listen to how God talks about it. He is speaking to people whose shepherds had walked off and left them scattered, which is a fair description of a person nobody came for:

For thus says the Lord God: Behold, I, I myself will search for my sheep and will seek them out.Ezekiel 34:11

I, I myself. Read the doubling. He does not say He will send someone. He does not say He will arrange for the sheep to find their own way back. When nobody came, He said He would come Himself, in person, and seek them out, and a few lines later He says who He is looking for: I will seek the lost (Ezekiel 34:16). Not the ones who made it out. The lost.

You have been sought, in person, by God Himself, and that is not a figure of speech. I am not saying this to make the empty barrier hurt less. I am saying it because it is written, and because the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a line from Ezekiel into an arrivals hall and makes it about you. Somebody came. Not somebody with your name on a card. Somebody with your name.

He came all the way

The promise in Ezekiel is a promise of a person arriving. Then a person arrived. Jesus put it in one sentence about Himself, standing in a house nobody respectable would go into: the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). Came. Past tense, a journey completed. He did not send word ahead. He did not wait at the barrier for you to walk to Him. He came into the place where you actually were, which is what coming for somebody means.

And He told a story about the length of the trip. A shepherd with a hundred sheep loses one and goes after it until he finds it (Luke 15:4). Read the until. Not for a reasonable time. Not until it got dark. Until. There is no version of that story where the shepherd does the arithmetic and turns back, and there is no version of your story where He does either.

You are not left, and you were never left, because the one who came does not stop before He arrives. That is His word about Himself and not mine, and His Spirit is the one who makes found a present tense thing in you rather than a doctrine you agree with. What you are standing in this minute, out by the taxi stand, is not abandonment. It is the ground He crossed to get to you.

I want to be careful here, because I know the shape of your ache and I am not going to lie to it. I am not telling you a person is going to be at the next barrier. I do not know that, and nobody does, and an article that promised it would be handing you the same arithmetic in a nicer envelope. The one who came is Christ. That is what I am telling you, and it is enough to be true on its own.

The smallest true thing you can say

Here is what has to happen now, and it is very small. Jesus said faith no bigger than a seed, spoken, moves a mountain (Matthew 17:20). Not thought. Spoken. The seed is put to work by a mouth, and the mountain is named.

Your mountain has a name and it is not the empty barrier. It is the sentence you have been living by: no one is coming to get me. It has been running your eyes for years. It decides where you look when the doors open. And you have authority over it, not because you are strong, but because Christ is in you and He came, and a sentence built on a wrong sum does not get to keep the room once the sum is corrected.

You have the standing to say out loud that you are found, and saying it is not pretending. Scripture says the seeking was His and the coming was His, and the Holy Spirit is the current in the words, not the confidence in your voice. You are not announcing that somebody arrived. You are agreeing with the One who did.