From the porch you can see a half mile of that road, and the reason you can is that it runs straight along the fence line before it bends at the walnut tree. A car cannot get to this house without being visible for a minute and a half. Longer if it is going slow. And in July the dust hangs, so you see it before you hear it: a rust colored plume above the fence posts, rising, coming on.
Wanda was eleven the summer she learned that.
She came to her aunt's place in May with a suitcase and a paper sack, and what she had been told, in the kitchen, by her own father, with his hand flat on the table, was that this was for a while and he would come back for her before school started.
So she watched the road.
Every evening from after supper until she could not see the fence posts. She had a spot on the second step where the boards were warm the longest. She knew the mail carrier's dust from the milk hauler's dust. She knew that a plume that slowed at the walnut tree was a car looking for a turn, and her whole chest would go up into her throat, and then it would be the Prathers, or somebody lost, or a man selling something.
She did that in May and June and July and most of August. School started. She watched into September because the leaves had not turned. She watched into October because the leaves turning did not mean anything by itself.
I am not going to tell you what was going on with her father, because I do not know and neither do you, and this is not a trial. Something was. It usually is. It does not change what happened on that step.
What happened on that step is the thing this is actually about, and it is not the summer. It is what came after the summer. Somewhere in that first cold week, an eleven year old girl made a decision that a person only has to make once: she stopped watching. And she did it well. She did it so thoroughly that seventy-one years old now, sitting in that same house on that same porch, when a car comes along the fence line and slows at the walnut tree, Wanda does not look up.
She does not want anything. She has said so, cheerfully, for sixty years. That is not peace. That is a girl who found out exactly what watching costs and closed the account.
You know that road. Maybe yours was a phone that was going to ring, or a person who said they were coming and had every intention of it, or just a long stretch of years in which you noticed that when things got bad, the getting out was always done by you. So you stopped scanning the horizon. It was practical. It hurt less. And it hardened, quietly, into the operating assumption underneath your whole life: nobody is coming, and I am not the kind of person anybody makes the trip for. Hear the other sentence now, because it is older than yours. You have been come for already, in a body, all the way down the road. Hebrews 2:14 says He took the same flesh and blood we have rather than sending word about it, and the Holy Spirit has been holding that sentence out to you every time you refuse to look up.
He did not send word
There is a line in Hebrews that people quote for its theology and skip for its geography, and the geography is the part that would have gotten you off that step.
Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.Hebrews 2:14
He also himself likewise took part of the same.
Read the pile up of those words. Himself. Likewise. The same. The writer is standing on the point with both feet, because the point is not that God was concerned about us from where He was. The point is that He came into the same material we are made of. Lungs. A spine. A body that gets tired at four in the afternoon and cold at night and hungry on the road.
Anybody can send word. Sending word is what the whole world does. Sympathy is cheap and it travels well and it does not require anybody to leave the house.
He did not do that. He came down the fence line in a body, visible for a minute and a half, and He did not turn around at the walnut tree.
You are the one He came the whole distance for, and He did it in flesh and blood rather than sending a message about it. It is written in Hebrews 2:14 in plain words, and the Spirit is what turns that from a doctrine you already agreed with into the sound of somebody's step on your own boards.
The arrival is in the past tense
Now the part that changes the grammar of your whole life, and I want to be exact about it, because if I am careless here I will hand you a sixtieth summer of watching.
I am not telling you that a car is coming up that road. I do not know that. Nobody who is honest with you can tell you which human being is going to turn in at your walnut tree, and if I say one is in order to make this land warmer, I have put you back on the second step and gone home.
What I am telling you is something else entirely, and you have to hear the tense of it.
He came. Past tense. Finished. Historic, dated, in a body, at a real address, on a road with dust on it. Galatians 4:4 puts it in calendar language, that when the fullness of the time was come, God sent forth His Son, made of a woman. Not a rescue being planned. A rescue that has already happened and is behind you in time, not ahead of you in hope.
That is why this is not another thing to wait for. You are not being asked to start scanning the horizon again with a heart you already know cannot take it. The watching is over because the arrival is over.
You were come for before you ever sat down on that step, and nothing about that summer got in the way of it. His word settled that in Galatians 4:4 and it has a date on it, and His Spirit is what makes an old fact feel like an arrival at your own house.
So here is the turn, and it is small enough to carry.
You do not have to start watching again. Let me say it plainly, because it is the thing you have been braced against since the first paragraph: nothing in this asks you to sit back down on that step and start counting plumes above the fence posts. That was an eleven year old's job and she did it long enough for two lifetimes and she is off duty.
The only thing being asked of you is to turn around and notice who is in the house.
Because that is where He already is. Not on the road. Not slowing at the walnut tree, and not something you have to keep an eye out for. The coming happened, and the whole point of Hebrews 2 is that He came into the same flesh in order to be permanently on this side of the door with us.
It is already done, and it was done in a body, at a date, whether or not anybody else ever turned in. Scripture said it once in Hebrews 2:14 and the Spirit says it again every evening, putting the boots back on the boards until you believe you heard them the first time.
And this is not compensation for the summer of 1966. What Christ did is not a substitute handed to you because a car did not come. It does not make up for anything and it was not offered as a trade, and it does not need one human being to have failed in order to stand. It was already the deeper true thing on every one of those evenings while an eleven year old sat on a warm board and watched the dust.
Declare this over yourself
Say these once, out loud, sitting where you are. This is agreement, not effort: the coming is finished and the standing is yours in Christ before you open your mouth. What He does next is His to decide and He answers in His own way and His own timing, which is exactly why the weight of this never lands back on you.
- Empty road at the end of that porch, you are a half mile of dust and not the verdict on whether anybody ever came for me. Hebrews 2:14 says He took flesh and blood on Himself and came in person, and He came the whole way down.
- Not worth the trip, you are the oldest thing I believe and you are finished in this house. His word says He shared in the same flesh in order to come Himself, and in the name of Jesus I stop keeping count of the cars that did not slow at the tree.
- Jesus, You came the whole distance Yourself and You did not send word ahead, and I take Your word for that over one summer and every summer since. Your Spirit says it on this porch in the evening when the dust settles, and today I say out loud that I have been found, and then I sit still.
Hebrews 2:14
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