The Water Between Him and Home

Nainoa left in February and it was the right thing and everybody who knows the whole story would say so.

The house was full. The house had been full since he was small and it got fuller, and the arrangement that ran it was one where Nainoa was the one who worked and everybody else was the one who decided, and it had gone on for eleven years past the point where it should have been examined. He is thirty-six. He went to the mainland, to a job in a warehouse in a town with no ocean in it, and he has an apartment with nothing in it but a mattress and a chair, and his own money, and his own Saturdays.

He calls home on Sundays. Everybody is fine. Nobody is angry at him. Two of them have said, in different ways, that they are proud of him, and one of those two was the person he least expected it from.

Here is what is happening to him.

He cannot get through the evenings. Somewhere around seven, in a town where the sun goes down behind buildings instead of behind water, something arrives that he cannot name and cannot outrun. He has started driving after work. Not anywhere. Just driving, for an hour, because sitting in the apartment at seven is worse.

And on a Thursday in August, in a parking lot, with the engine off, he found himself thinking a sentence so clearly that it might as well have been said out loud: I would go back tomorrow.

Not because anything there is better. He knows exactly what it is. He knows he would be back inside it in six weeks. He would go anyway.

That is the part that frightens him. Not the missing. The fact that the missing does not appear to care what he knows.

Here is the moment it caught.

His sister, on the Sunday call, cheerful, said, "How's it going out there, are you settled?"

And he said, "Getting there."

And she said, "Good. Everybody's proud of you."

And he got off that phone and sat on the edge of a mattress in an empty room and did not move for a long time.

You know this stretch. Out for good reason, everybody agrees, everybody is proud, and there is an hour in the evening where you would give it all back, and you have not said that to a living soul.

The word is when

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

I am not going to tell you whether to stay out there or go back. I cannot see your family or your town or your job, and a page that tells a man what to do about his own home is a page that has forgotten what it is. I am not going to tell you how long this evening thing lasts either.

What I will do is read you one of the most misquoted verses in the Bible, and I want you to notice one word in it.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.Isaiah 43:2

When.

Not if. The verse does not open a possibility, it schedules a certainty. There will be water. There will be rivers. There will be fire. That is not a warning tacked on to a promise; it is the setting the promise was written for.

And what is promised is not the removal of the water. Read it again and see what God does not say. He does not say the river will dry up. He does not say you will be spared the crossing. He says: I will be with thee, and it shall not overflow thee.

You are accompanied in the crossing rather than exempted from it, and the verse is built that way deliberately. Isaiah 43:2 promises presence rather than the absence of water, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a parking lot at seven in the evening.

Now notice what that does to the evenings. If the promise were you will not miss home, then missing home would be evidence that something has gone wrong. But the promise is not that. The promise assumes deep water. Which means the water is not a sign of a wrong turn; it is the terrain the promise was made for.

You have not walked into something God failed to anticipate, and the whole verse was written for exactly the stretch that has you driving at seven. It is written that the waters come and He is in them, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient promise fit a present hour.

Missing is not a verdict

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

The sentence in the parking lot, I would go back tomorrow, is not a confession of failure and it is not a sign that Nainoa chose wrong. It is what happens when a person leaves a place that held everything, including the bad things, including the arrangement, including also the smell of the kitchen and the sound of a house at night and everybody he has ever loved.

He did not leave a prison. He left a home that had an arrangement inside it. Those are not the same thing and the missing is not confused about the difference: it is missing the home, accurately, while remaining entirely clear about the arrangement.

You are permitted to miss the good things that were in a place you were right to leave, and Scripture never asks anybody to pretend a hard place had nothing in it. Numbers 11 has Israel remembering actual fish and actual cucumbers, and the text does not deny that they had them, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps an honest memory from being turned into a charge.

And here is the specific thing I want to take off you, because it is the one doing the damage. It is not the missing. It is the belief that the missing is a vote. That wanting to go back means some part of you has judged the leaving and found it wrong.

The missing is not a vote. It does not have a position on your decision. It is grief for a place, and grief does not do arithmetic.

You were never asked to stop loving where you came from in order to be allowed to have left it, and there is no verse anywhere that requires that trade. Isaiah 43:1 has God calling a people by name in the same breath as the water, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps love of a place and clarity about it in the same chest at once.

And I will say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the hour at seven has gone somewhere worse than lonely, or if the driving has become the only thing holding an evening together, do not carry that alone in a town where nobody knows you. Tell somebody this week. Your sister on the Sunday call, a person at work, 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 your family or your job. That is me refusing to leave you in that parking lot by yourself.