You Were Never Not With Me

The strings of lights along the fence have four bulbs out and every year somebody says they will fix them and every year nobody does, and by now the four dead bulbs are basically a family tradition.

Dusk. Folding chairs everywhere. Plates being carried in in stacks. His aunt still talking to two people by the gate who are clearly trying to leave.

Good day. Genuinely.

And at about six o'clock somebody said the thing. His cousin, with all the love in the world, hand on his arm, laughing: you used to be so full of life, you.

Nothing in it. Nobody heard it but him. She meant it as affection about a boy at a wedding twenty years ago.

And he has been carrying it since, and by the time he was stacking the third set of chairs he had started an inventory. Everything he used to be and is not. Everything he has not done. Every year he was present and not there.

The inventory is running now, quietly, under the goodbyes, and it will run in the car and it will run at home.

Hermano, sit on the last folding chair with me before we put it away. Because there is a sentence in a parable everybody knows, said to the brother nobody preaches about.

The son who never went anywhere

Everybody knows the story of the son who left. The other one gets four verses at the end and almost no attention.

He is the one who stayed. He worked. He kept the place going. And when the party starts for his brother he will not go in, and his father comes out to him, and the son lists his own years out loud, which is exactly what you are doing with the chairs.

And the father says this.

Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.Luke 15:31

Two clauses and both of them are aimed at exactly your situation.

Thou art ever with me. Present tense, continuous, and the word ever means the whole of it. The father's summary of all those years is not that the son was dutiful but distant. It is that he was with him.

And all that I have is thine. Nothing was being withheld during any of it. The son had assumed there was a reward he had not been given yet, and the father tells him he has had access to everything the entire time.

You are being told by a father that you were with him the whole way through, and that is said to the son who stayed rather than the one who left. That is not a stretch of a famous parable; Luke 15:31 is spoken to the brother in the field, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the least preached four verses in that chapter and lays them on a folding chair at dusk with four bulbs out. Your staying was never invisible.

Now the inventory, and let me be plain, because you are a man who will notice if I am not.

The son in that parable does the same thing you are doing. He stands in front of his father and lists years. Lo, these many years do I serve thee. He has been counting, in private, for a long time, and the party is what makes him say it out loud.

And the father does not correct the arithmetic. He does not argue about the goat or the friends. He answers with a relationship, not with a ledger.

You are being answered with a relationship rather than an audit, and the father in that story never once engages with the numbers. Luke 15:31 answers a list of years with son, thou art ever with me, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that the manner of God with a man rather than a nice moment in a story.

What your cousin actually said

One more thing, and then we will stack the chair.

Your cousin said you used to be so full of life. And you heard: and now you are not, and everybody has noticed, and it is a loss.

What she actually did was remember you fondly at a wedding twenty years ago. That is the whole of it. It was affection, aimed backward, said with a hand on your arm.

You supplied the second half of that sentence yourself. Nobody said it. You wrote it, and then you responded to it, and it has been running for four hours.

You have been answering a sentence nobody finished, and the second half of it was written by you. Proverbs 18:21 says death and life are in the power of the tongue, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that as true about the things a man says to himself in a yard as about anything anybody says out loud.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say goodbye to people at a gate.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not how full of life you were at twenty five. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.