Get Up and Walk · Week 4 · Saturday Recap

The Walk Back

I have spent this week sitting with Onesimus.

The runaway slave who could have stayed safe in Rome, useful to Paul, far from the master he had robbed and fled. Instead he picked up a letter and walked back toward the one place on earth where he could legally be destroyed. He walked back into the household he had wronged, to stand in front of the man he had wronged, and wait to see what mercy would do with him.

He did not have to. That is the part that has stayed with me all week. He chose the walk back.

He chose the walk back.

What I Spent the Week Noticing

I have been thinking about my own Onesimus roads.

The people I have wronged and never gone back to. The wounds I caused in my marriage and my fathering and my friendships, the ones I papered over because burying felt so much easier than naming. The conversations I have been postponing for so long that the postponing has become its own settled state. Comfortable, almost. Nearly invisible. The kind of unfinished business you can live next to for years without quite looking at it directly.

I am good at worshipping around them. I will be honest with you about that, because this whole thing only works if I am honest with you. I can pray for a long time without ever walking near the rooms I do not want to enter. I can read my Bible and lead my family and sing on a Sunday and keep a held breath going the entire time around the one or two names I have decided to leave alone. I can tell myself the other person should come to me first. And I can be right about that, and stay completely alone with how right I am.

One Verse I Keep Coming Back To

The man’s name, Onesimus, meant “useful.” He had spent his life being the opposite of his name. And the thing that turned him from achrēstos, useless, into euchrēstos, useful, was not that he finally felt brave. It was that he got on a road and walked back toward the person he had wronged.

The usefulness was on the far side of the walk. Not before it. Not instead of it. On the other side of the hardest road he ever took.

I think I have had it backwards for years. I have been waiting to feel reconciled before I do the walking. Waiting for the bitterness to lift before I pick up the phone. Waiting for the other person to soften before I soften. But reconciliation was never a feeling I was waiting to have. It was always a walk I was refusing to take. Onesimus did not wait until he felt safe. Paul did not wait until it was convenient. Jesus said leave the gift right there on the altar and go first, before the song, before the offering, before you feel ready.

What I Want for You This Morning

There is a person you need to call. I think you have known it the whole time you have been reading this. We have probably both been carrying the name around for a while now, stepping around it like a cracked board in the floor, telling ourselves we have moved on when really we have just gotten skilled at not looking down.

Here is what I want you to do today. Pick up the cracked board. Look at the name. Then do the smallest first thing. Not the whole reconciliation. Just the first step of the walk. The text. The four lines. The call that rings four times. The letter folded on the counter. The cup of coffee carried up the stairs.

I will tell you the truth: I am writing this as much to myself as to you. There is a call I have been not-making. So this is me telling you that I am going to make mine this week. Make yours.

The walk back is the work. Not the wish. The walk.

Next week we close the series with a man who came to Jesus in the dark because he was afraid of what it would cost him in the daylight. His name is Nicodemus. We are going to talk about the day your private faith finally has to walk out into public.

Next Week · Week 5 · Meet Nicodemus · The Series Finale