He Misses Knowing the Rules

Yonatan can tell you what he would be doing right now, this minute, if he were still in it.

It is Tuesday at nine forty in the evening. In the old community there was a thing that happened at nine forty on a Tuesday, and there was a thing at six, and a thing at five in the morning, and a set of answers for every question a person could have about food, clothing, money, travel, marriage, illness and death.

He left eighteen months ago. The reasons were not doctrinal, in the end. They were about a decision made about his sister and how it was made and by whom, and he could not stay after it, and he has never once thought he was wrong.

He is thirty-seven. He has a job and a small apartment and a synagogue he goes to sometimes and a set of friends who are all, in one way or another, also out of something.

Here is what he has told no one.

He does not miss the leaders. He does not miss the rules for what they were, which he can now describe with considerable precision as an apparatus. He misses knowing.

He misses waking up and having the whole day already decided. He misses the fact that a hard question had an answer, and the answer was findable, and somebody knew it even if he did not. He misses never once, in twenty-nine years, having to work out from first principles what a decent man should do about anything.

Now everything is a question. What he eats. What he does on a Friday. Whether to go to his cousin's thing. Whether the way he is raising his own son is right. And every one of those questions comes to his desk, and there is nobody above his desk.

Here is the night it caught.

His friend, who left a different thing at a different time, said over coffee, "Do you ever miss it?"

And Yonatan said, "No."

And his friend said, "Yeah," in a way that meant me neither, and then, after about a minute, "I miss knowing what to do at nine forty on a Tuesday."

And Yonatan did not answer for a while, and then he said, "Yes."

You know that ache. Not for the system. For the certainty. And you cannot say it, because saying you miss the rules sounds like you want to go back under them, and you do not, and there is no short way to explain the difference.

Stand fast is a load-bearing instruction

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you what you left or hand you a verdict on it. I am not going to tell you what to eat or what to do on a Friday, which would be a strange and ironic thing to do to a man in this particular position. And I am not going to tell you the questions get easier.

What I will do is read you the shortest sentence Paul ever wrote about freedom and notice the verb in it.

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.Galatians 5:1

Stand fast.

That is a strenuous instruction. It is not rest in. It is not enjoy. It is the word you would use for a man holding a position in a line, which takes muscle and attention and does not get easier by being correct.

Which tells you something the whole verse assumes and never argues for: liberty is harder work than the yoke was.

You are being asked to do something demanding rather than something restful, and Galatians 5 is honest about that in its first word. Galatians 5:1 uses a verb about holding ground, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into an apartment at nine forty on a Tuesday.

And notice the rest of the sentence. Be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Paul says again. He is writing to people who had been out and were drifting back, and he is not surprised by it and he does not call them fools for feeling the pull. He addresses it plainly, as a live and reasonable danger, which means he considered the pull normal.

You have not surprised anybody by feeling the pull, and the apostle wrote an entire letter to people who felt it strongly enough to act on it. It is written that he warned them against being entangled again, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient warning a companionship rather than a rebuke.

The certainty was real, and it cost something

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

I am not going to tell Yonatan that what he had was never really certainty. It was. It was genuinely a system in which the questions had answers, and a man could live in it for twenty-nine years and never have to construct one for himself, and there is a real relief in that which nobody who has not had it should be allowed to sneer at.

You are not remembering something that never existed, and Scripture never once pretends that a yoke gives nothing. Galatians 5:1 calls it a yoke rather than a fiction, and the Holy Spirit is what allows an honest description of a thing without endorsing it.

Here is what the certainty cost, and Yonatan knows it, and this is why he is not going back: the answers were findable because somebody else made them, and the somebody else also made the decision about his sister.

Those were the same apparatus. He could not keep the one and refuse the other. That is what he found out eighteen months ago and it is why he is sitting in an apartment at nine forty with nothing scheduled.

You are carrying the cost of a decision you would make again, and that is a different weight from regret. Galatians 5:1 sets liberty and the yoke as genuine alternatives rather than as an obvious choice, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a hard trade from being read as a mistake.

And here is what I do not want you to do, and it is the thing men in your position do most. Do not go and find another apparatus. Not a church with a hard edge, not a teacher with all the answers, not a system with a rule for nine forty. The ache for certainty is real and it is exactly the thing that walks a free man back under a yoke, and it will present itself as maturity.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If eighteen months of every question landing on your desk has gone somewhere heavier than tiring, or if what happened with your sister left something that has never been looked at squarely, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your friend from the coffee, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about that community. That is me refusing to leave you at that desk by yourself.