No Visitor Since February

He worked in the yard for about fourteen months and everybody liked him.

Twenty three. Fast, funny, a bit chaotic. He would bring in food he had made, which nobody else ever did, and it was always slightly too much and slightly too spicy and he was delighted with himself about it.

Then in February there was a court date that everybody knew about, and then a sentence, and then he was gone.

Nobody in that yard has done anything unkind. There was no gossip to speak of and there was, at the time, a fair amount of genuine sadness. Two men said, out loud, in the same week, that they should write.

It is August.

Nobody has been. Nobody has written. As far as anybody knows, and one of the lads did try to find out, he has had no visitor at all since he went in.

And here is what has been quietly happening in the meantime, and it is worth naming because it happens to nearly everybody in this situation and almost nobody notices it happening to them.

The longer nobody writes, the harder writing gets. In March a letter would have been ordinary. By May it needed to explain the gap. By August it feels like a letter that would have to be about something, and nobody has anything to say that is worth the size the letter has become.

So a good man sits in a truck at half five, most Fridays, and thinks about a young man he liked, and drives home.

As bound with them

There is a line near the end of Hebrews, one verse after the one about entertaining strangers, and almost nobody quotes it.

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.Hebrews 13:3

Take that in the truck at half five. You can reach him this week with almost nothing in your hands. The word says remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries ordinary news into a place that has none.

Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them.

Not: pity them. Not: pray for them from a distance, though pray. As bound with them. The instruction is to remember a man the way you would want to be remembered if the doors had shut on you instead, which is not with sympathy but with ordinariness.

Think about what you would want. Not a letter about your situation. Not encouragement. You would want to know that the yard is still the yard. That somebody's van finally died. That the new lad cannot reverse a trailer. That it rained all through July.

You would want, more than anything, evidence that you are still a person who exists in a place you used to exist in.

So take this in your truck, and know it is not my sentiment, it is what is written: you are able to reach him this week with almost nothing. His word says remember them that are in bonds as bound with them, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept a twenty three year old in your mind on a Friday at half five since February.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he had not wanted to attend, and what came out of it was a timetable, and the largest single thing on that timetable was prisons.

Fifty years of it. Debtors' gaols where men were held for money they could not earn while held. He went to individuals, again and again, and he sat with men the night before they were hanged.

And what he mostly did in those rooms, by his own account, was not preach. He talked to them. He asked about their people. He brought news and food and ordinary human traffic into places designed to have none.

The name that got fixed on those people started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the direction it went was into rooms where nobody could give him anything at all.