The One Who Comes Out After You

The phone said eight percent and the fog had come in at about ten to four.

Alan had walked that ridge maybe thirty times. That was the whole trouble. He had come off the marked path at the cairn because there is a shortcut down the shoulder that saves forty minutes, and the shortcut had been fine for eleven years and was not fine in fog.

By twenty past four he could see about nine feet in any direction and every direction looked identical.

He had a whistle on an orange lanyard he had never once used. He had a foil blanket still in its wrapper, folded flat, from a first aid kit he bought in a hurry in 2019 and never opened. He had half a granola bar.

He made the call at four forty and he was embarrassed before it connected.

The woman on the line took his details in the flattest, kindest voice he had ever heard, and then she said: "Alan. Do not move. Stay exactly where you are. Somebody is already walking in to you."

And Alan argued with her.

He heard himself do it. He said, if you point me east I can get myself down to the road, I know this hill, I do not want to waste anybody's evening. He said, I got myself into this. He had a whole speech ready, most of it about what an idiot he had been and how much trouble he was causing and how he would put it right.

She let him finish and then said, "Alan. We are already walking. Sit down, keep the whistle in your hand, and let us do our job."

So he sat down on a wet rock in the fog and did the hardest thing a capable man ever does on a mountain, which is nothing at all.

At twelve minutes past six he saw two lamps swing up out of the white, low down and moving fast. One of them knelt beside the rock and put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Alan? Good. We have got you."

Nobody mentioned the shortcut. Nobody asked why he had left the path. On the way down one of them talked about his brother's greenhouse for forty minutes, and Alan cried a bit in the dark and nobody made anything of that either.

Here is what he had believed his entire life, and had never once said out loud: that being helped means being given instructions. That somebody sensible assesses you from a distance and tells you what to do, and if you do it well enough you get yourself back.

If you have been sorry about something for years and are no nearer home than when you started, stay on the rock with me for a minute. I think you have been given directions when what was coming was a person.

He never stood at the far end of the field

There is a chapter in Ezekiel where God gets angry, and it is worth knowing who He gets angry at, because most people assume it is the sheep.

It is not. Ezekiel 34 is God's complaint against shepherds who fed themselves and did not go out. The sick were not strengthened, the broken were not bound up, the driven away were not brought back, and the lost were not sought. That is the charge. Nobody went out after them.

And then God says something that changes the shape of the sky: I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out. He takes the job off them and puts it on Himself.

I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick.Ezekiel 34:16

Read the verbs. Every single one of them has God as the subject. Not one of them is a thing the sheep does. You have a God who goes out, and the picture in your head of Him waiting at a distance to see whether you manage it on your own is not in this book anywhere. Ezekiel 34:16 is where that is written down in His own words, and it is His Spirit who is pressing an ancient complaint about shepherds into a very personal place in you right now.

Now here is the difference between regret and the turn, and it is the hinge of the whole thing.

Regret is a feeling that leaves you at the same coordinates. It is genuinely sorry. It can be sorry for eleven years. It reviews the same evening over and over with better lighting, and at the end of every review you are still sitting on the same wet rock in the same fog. That is not a moral failure. It is simply that sorrow is not transport.

The turn is different because it is a direction, and because you are not the engine of it. Joel 2:12 says turn ye even to me with all your heart, and then, before anybody can turn that into a performance, verse 13 says rend your heart and not your garments, and gives the reason: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. The reason to turn is His character. Not your shame. Shame has never once got anybody home; it only makes people better at hiding. And it is His Spirit who moves a heart at all, so even the wanting to turn did not begin with you.

So hear this before you try to generate anything. You are being drawn, not assessed. Jesus said plainly that no one comes unless the Father draws him, and in Jeremiah 31:3 God says with lovingkindness have I drawn thee, and the same Spirit who moved a prophet to write down the word lovingkindness is the one at work in you in the middle of an ordinary day.

Hosea says it the way a family says it: come, and let us return unto the LORD: for he hath torn, and he will heal us. Notice there is no waiting period in that sentence. No probation. No demonstration first.

And Jesus told it as a story with a father in it who saw a long way off and ran. The son had a speech. He had rehearsed it walking, the way Alan rehearsed his on the rock: I am not worthy, make me a hired servant, I will earn my place back. He got about two lines into it before his father talked over him and started giving orders about shoes.

That is not a father lowering his standards. That is a father who had been looking down that road every day and had never once stopped calling him son.

So if this is your first turn, you are welcome. And if this is your hundredth turn, you are welcome in precisely the same way, at the same volume, with the same running. The Scripture never puts a counter on it, and His Spirit has never once treated a hundredth turn as a lesser event than a first.