The Last Bus and the Long Walk

The shift ends at eleven forty and the last bus goes at eleven twenty, and that has been the arrangement for nine years, so Ray does not even look at the schedule taped inside the door on his way out anymore.

He puts the mop head in the sink and the sink smells the way it always smells. He signs the sheet. He pulls the shutter down on the loading side and hears it hit, and then he is out in it, and the rain has stopped but everything is still wet and shining, and the whole street is that orange color the sodium lights make when the asphalt is soaked.

It is forty minutes. He knows every part of it. Down past the tire place with the chain across the lot, under the overpass where his own footsteps come back at him for eleven seconds, past the gas station on the corner that is open all night and where the man behind the glass raises two fingers at him without looking up, then the long flat stretch by the fence where nothing happens for nine minutes, then the hill, then home.

It is not a hardship. He would want you to know that. He is fifty-three and he can walk. There is nothing pitiful about a man walking home from work in a country where the buses stop early, and if you said something sympathetic about it he would look at you like you had misunderstood something. The walk is fine. The walk is genuinely fine.

Here is the part he does not say. Somewhere in the second year he started taking his phone out on the flat stretch by the fence. Not to call anybody. Just to scroll the contacts, thumb going down, forty-one names, and every one of them is somebody who would not mind hearing from him at a reasonable hour on a reasonable day. Not one of them is somebody you call at ten to midnight and say, I am on Bellevue by the fence, come get me. He does not want a ride. That is what would be hard to explain. He wants there to exist, in the world, one person for whom his being out there at midnight would be a fact that mattered, and there is not one, and the scroll takes about four seconds, and then he puts the phone back in his coat.

Somewhere around year four he stopped noticing that he did it. Now it is just a thing his hand does by the fence.

And what he arrived at, quietly, without any drama about it, is a settled understanding that no one is coming. Not out of bitterness. As arithmetic. Nine years of data. He built a life that works around it, and it does work, and that is exactly what makes it so hard to say out loud that anything is wrong.

You know that stretch of road. Maybe yours is a walk, and maybe it is a waiting room chair or a Sunday afternoon or the drive back from the hospital, and maybe you also long since filed it under fine. You are not asking for a ride. You worked out a long time ago that nobody is coming for you, and you have been decent about it, which is somehow the saddest part. You were come after by God Himself, and He did not wait to be called and He did not send somebody else in His place. That is written into Luke 15:4, and the Spirit has been walking that flat stretch by the fence with you for nine years.

The Shepherd goes out, and He goes Himself

Jesus told this one as a question, which is not the way you tell a story you want admired. It is the way you tell a story you want somebody to answer.

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

Read the movement in it. The sheep does not find its way back. The sheep does not signal, arrange anything, or improve its position. Every verb that matters in that sentence belongs to the shepherd: he leaves, he goes after, he finds. And he goes himself. He does not stay with the ninety-nine and delegate the search to somebody with less to do, which is what a sensible man with a hundred animals and one night of daylight left would obviously do.

And notice where the shepherd goes. Out. Into the wilderness, in the dark, along the bad ground, which is precisely where a man walks when he is one of ninety-nine to everybody and one to nobody. The story does not have the lost one brought in to the fire. It has the fire come out into the dark to where it is.

You are the one the Shepherd went out after, and He went before you had any way of asking. Scripture says it once in Luke 15:4, and the Spirit says it again every night that bus pulls out at eleven twenty without you.

Nothing about the one made Him go

Now let me take away the thing you would use to make this reasonable.

There is no sentence anywhere in that story about the quality of the sheep. It is not the best of the hundred. It is not the one with promise. Jesus does not give it a single characteristic except the one that matters: it is his. That is the entire ground of the search. The shepherd goes because of whose it is, not because of what it is, and the ninety-nine are not less loved and the one is not more deserving. The one is simply the one who is out there, and out there is where he goes.

Which means the nine years cannot be read the way you have been reading them. You have taken a phone that never rings as evidence about your value, and it is not evidence about your value. It is evidence about a contact list. The Shepherd was never in your contacts and He never needed to be, because He was not waiting for a call. He was already on the road.

It is already settled, and it was settled by whose you are and not by what you are worth to anybody. That is the plain reading of Luke 15:4, and the Holy Spirit does not soften it down into a maybe.