Go Back In · Week 1 · Saturday

On Sunday I said it will cost you something to stop waiting and drive over to a friend’s house. It is smaller and worse than you would want it to be typically.

It could cost you four months of Saturdays. It is still costing them.

Going in is one afternoon

Here is the part nobody puts on a poster. Going back in is one afternoon. Staying in is every week after it.

You usually do not fix anything that first day. You sit in a kitchen and talk around it for two hours — the job, the weather, a truck he was thinking about — and then said one true sentence standing at the door you leave. Then you drive home not knowing whether you had helped or intruded, and likely still do not entirely know.

So you have to go back the next week. And the one after that.

There were weeks I did not want to go. There were weeks I scheduled something afterward on purpose so I would have a clean reason to leave early. I am not proud of that. I did it anyway, and I would rather tell you that than let this sound like something noble.

Where everybody ends up

Read the last verse of Mark 1 and pay attention to who is where when the story closes.

But the man went out and openly began to proclaim and spread the news. Consequently, Jesus could no longer enter a town in plain view, but He stayed out in solitary places. Yet people came to Him from every quarter.Mark 1:45 (BSB)

They trade places.

The man who began this passage under a law requiring him to live alone outside the camp is now moving freely through every town he can reach. And the one who crossed the line to touch him is out in the solitary places, unable to enter a town in plain view.

That is not incidental. That is the shape of the entire thing, stated in one sentence at the end of a chapter, where most of us stop reading.

Nobody got a clean landing

Look back at the five men this week.

The husband said the number out loud and his wife went quiet for a long time, and it did not resolve that night. The father gave up every true thing he could have said in his own defense and got very little back from a twelve-year-old. The manager stood in front of nine people and lost the version of himself that does not make mistakes like that. The man counting days told somebody on day nineteen and found day twenty harder, not easier. The neighbor returned a saw and stood on a porch with the disagreement still sitting there between them.

Not one of them got a clean landing. That was not me being grim for effect. It is what it actually is, and I would rather you know that before you try it than after.

Going in costs something. It is supposed to.

The room was already open

Here is the last thing, and it is the only part of this week that is not hard.

Every one of those men walked into a room that somebody else was already standing in. Somebody kept the door open. Somebody stayed out in the solitary places so that the door would still be open when he finally came.

You have a room like that. Somebody paid for it and probably never brought it up.

It is worth knowing who. And then it is worth being that, for somebody who is still outside, still telling himself he will come back when he is presentable.

Go Back In · Week 1 Complete · The series continues