The Flight Home He Did Not Book

Late afternoon and the vine over the table is doing the thing it does with the light, and his father is telling a story he has told before and getting a detail wrong on purpose to see if anybody corrects him.

Two years.

He was there nine years. He had the flat over the shop on the corner and he had the job and he had a life that was, by any measure he would have used at the time, his actual life. He had a plan with a shape to it and a year in the plan when things were supposed to happen.

The permit was refused in the September. There was an appeal and then there was not an appeal. He had eleven weeks to arrange a life into boxes and most of it did not come.

He did not choose the flight. Somebody else's decision put him on it and he has never once described it any other way.

And now it is a Tuesday and there is bread and there is tea and his father is telling the story, and the man across the table from him is somebody he had genuinely, quietly, written off ever knowing. Not through a row. Through nine years of a phone call at Christmas and about four sentences.

He cannot get the two things into the same shape.

Because there are people who say, kindly, that it worked out. And there are people who say it was God's plan. And every time somebody says that, something in him closes, because if that is true then the nine years were an error being corrected and he does not accept that and he would rather lose the table than accept it.

If something you did not choose gave you something you cannot give back, you know that table. And you know the exact trap: everybody wants me to say it was worth it, and I will not say that, and I do not know what I am allowed to say instead.

The word, and then Paul's careful sentence

Let me sit down at that table and say the plain thing while your father is on the part he always slows down for.

The problem is not the two years. The two years are good and you know they are good and you would fight anybody who suggested otherwise.

The problem is that the only sentence anybody offers you about it makes the nine years into a mistake God was fixing, and you will not sign that, and refusing to sign it has left you with no sentence at all.

So let me put the word straight first, and then give you a sentence.

Blessed does not mean the story tidied up. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It was on you in the flat over the shop and it is on you at this table, and it did not move house in the September.

Now Paul, and I want you to look at his verb, because it is one of the most carefully chosen in the New Testament.

But I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel.Philippians 1:12

The things which happened unto me. Not: the things God did to me. Not: the things arranged for me.

Happened. And then: have fallen out rather unto.

Fallen out. That is a phrase about how a thing has turned out, and it does not assign a cause, and Paul is a man perfectly capable of saying God did this when he means God did this, and he does not say it here.

He is writing from custody, about a wrongful imprisonment, and what he says is: this has turned out to serve something. He does not say it was sent to serve it.

You have a sentence available that Paul used about his own imprisonment, and it does not require you to call the loss a gift. Philippians 1:12 says fallen out rather than was sent, and it is the Holy Spirit who is able to hand a man a form of words precise enough to be honest at a table.

Two things that are both true

Now let me set the two things side by side, because you have been trying to make them into one for two years.

The nine years were real. There was a life in them. The refusal was a loss and it was administered by people who did not know your name, and it took a plan and a flat and a set of friendships that are now a message thread that has gone quiet.

And these two years are real. Your father across the table telling a story wrong on purpose. The Tuesdays. What you know about him now that you did not know, which you could not list but which you would not hand back.

Both. And here is the thing that changes the shape: they do not have to be reconciled.

The pressure you have been under, from every kind person for two years, is the pressure to make a single sentence out of two facts. And there is no single sentence, because one of them is a loss and one of them is a good and they are not on the same axis.

You are holding two true things and you were never required to fuse them into one. Scripture reports the imprisonment and the furtherance in the same verse without collapsing one into the other, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to carry two facts that do not resolve rather than needing a tidy story.

And I want to say the hard half plainly, because this site will not do the other thing.

God did not refuse your permit in order to get you home. Nobody in a government office was an instrument. If that were how it worked then every cruelty would be a method and there would be no such thing as a cruelty.

You are not looking at a plan that required a loss, and nothing in that verse says a thing was sent. The written word says the things which happened, in the passive, without an author named, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in what happens rather than the author of it.

What is actually being claimed

So what is left, once you have refused the tidy sentence?

This: God is at work in what happened. Not that He did it. That He is in it, and that something has come out of it which He is responsible for, and that the something is genuinely good and does not retrospectively justify the thing that produced it.

Which is a much smaller claim and it is the only honest one, and it happens to be exactly what Paul makes.

And notice what he does next in that chapter. He does not stop asking to be released. He asks the Philippians to pray for his deliverance. He wants out, in writing, in the same letter where he says it has fallen out for the furtherance.

A man is allowed to say both.

You have permission to be glad about this table and to say plainly that the nine years should not have ended that way. Philippians 1:19 has Paul asking them to pray for his deliverance in the same letter as verse twelve, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as helping our weakness, which includes the weakness of not having a sentence that covers everything.

I do not know what happens about going back. I am not going to guess. It may be possible one day and it may not, and that is a separate question from what has been true at this table for two years.