The Friends Who Stopped Calling

It is twenty to seven on a Friday, and the garage door is up.

The low sun comes straight down the street this time of year and lays a long rectangle of gold across the concrete, out past the two folding camp chairs and the cooler with the dent in the lid. He has a carburetor apart on a rag on the workbench, more for something to do with his hands than because the mower needs it.

By now he would have been at the bar on the highway with the peanut shells on the floor. Six of them, going back to when they all worked at the same shop. Two of them stood up at his wedding.

His phone is face down on the bench. He turns it over about every twenty minutes, which is a thing he would not admit to a living soul.

The thread is still there. It used to run forty messages a day, most of them stupid, some of them the only place any of those men ever said anything true. Fourteen months ago it thinned. Ten months ago it went to jokes he was tagged in and did not answer fast enough. The last thing anybody sent him directly was in March, and it was about a truck part.

Here is what he cannot work out, and it has sat on him since Easter.

He does not know whether they stopped calling or whether he stopped going.

He did stop going. That is honest. He stopped going to two things and then, without deciding anything, to everything, and some of that was good and some of it was just easier. But there was a stretch in there where he was different in a way he had no language for yet, and awkward about it, and a man who is awkward at a table gets invited to fewer tables. He can build a case either direction and he has built both, lying awake.

And the reason he cannot leave it alone is that neither answer is any good. If they dropped him, then something real got taken. And if he left, then he did it himself, to men who never did a thing to him, and he has been calling it faithfulness ever since.

Out on the street a neighbor's kid goes by on a bike. The gold rectangle on the floor gets longer and thinner and starts climbing the wall.

You know the garage. Yours might be a break room, or a group thread you are still technically in, or a lake weekend that stopped getting mentioned around you. And you know the two cases you have built at two in the morning, and how neither one of them lets you sleep.

The one man Jesus would not let follow Him

There is a scene in Mark 5 that I have never gotten over, and it has almost nothing to do with the part everybody remembers.

A man is living among the tombs on the far side of the lake. Nobody can hold him, nobody can help him, and everybody in that country knows exactly who he is, because he has been the thing they warn children about for years. Jesus crosses the water, and by the end of the paragraph the man is sitting down, dressed, and in his right mind.

Then comes the part I want you in the garage for. The man asks to come along.

And when he was come into the ship, he that had been possessed with the devil prayed him that he might be with him. Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee.Mark 5:18-19

Read who is asking and who is refusing. Everywhere else in the Gospels people are told to leave the boat, the booth, the nets, the father's house, and follow. Here is a man begging to go, and Jesus tells him no, and sends him back to the exact address everybody wanted him to disappear from.

Go home. To thy friends. Not to a new town where nobody knew what he used to be. Home, where they had chained him, and failed, and given up.

You are looking at a Lord who has sent a delivered man back down his own street on purpose, and that is in the text, not in my sympathy for you. Mark 5:19 has Jesus refusing the boat and naming the destination as home and friends, and it is His Spirit who does the sending in a life now, which is why an old street was never automatically the thing a man is supposed to lose.

Nothing about your history got thrown away

Now let me handle the thing under the thing, because this category is called nothing wasted for a reason.

Somewhere in the last few years an idea may have arrived that the new birth is a deletion. That the honest thing to do with twenty years of men, jokes, shop floors and a way of talking is to put it in a bag and set it on the curb, and that any fondness for it is backsliding with a nicer coat on.

Scripture does not talk that way. What it puts to death is a dominion, not a biography.

Look at the man from the tombs again. Same body, same voice, same country, same neighbors who had watched him break chains. Jesus did not give him a new name or a new region. He gave him back his mind and then handed him his own address as an assignment.

You have a history that was not confiscated, and the whole errand He gave that man is the proof of it. Mark 5:19 sends him to the people who knew him before, which means the before was useful to God rather than embarrassing to Him, and it is the Spirit who turns a man's own past into the thing he has to say.

Think of Joseph telling his brothers that they meant it for evil and God meant it for good. God did not wipe the record. He put it to work.

Which of you left is not the question the text is asking

Now to those two cases, the ones built at two in the morning.

I cannot tell you which is true, and I would not respect you if I pretended otherwise. Probably it is both, in the ordinary way these things are usually both: some of it a man being new and clumsy, some of it six men closing a gap he left.

But look at what the Lord actually handed that man, because it settles less than you want and more than you think.

And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel.Mark 5:20

He did not get an explanation of what those townspeople had been thinking all those years. He got a road and something to say on it. The whole ten cities, one street at a time, and the only credential he carried was a before and after they had all watched with their own eyes.

You were sent rather than exiled, and Scripture is where that distinction lives. Mark 5:20 has him departing on an errand instead of being cut loose, and it is the same Spirit who moved that man down his own roads who has been moving in a garage on a Friday night, which makes a quiet phone a question and never a sentence.

And let me say the hard half plainly, because a shepherd who skips it is no use to you. Some of those men may not come back. That is a real loss and it deserves to be grieved rather than explained. Nothing in the Gospel asks you to pretend a good table you no longer sit at was never good.

You are allowed to miss them out loud, and the word of God has never once required a man to lie about what he lost. Scripture keeps whole books of honest grief without a syllable of scolding attached, and the Spirit is called the Comforter, which is a title that assumes there is something in the room to be comforted about.