The Turn Is Not Yours To Start

Brendan finished his shift at twenty past five and drove the long way, which is what he called it, though everyone who knew him would have called it something else.

The long way went up past the school and along the terrace and stopped at the bottom of Kilbride Road, and he pulled in there with the engine running and the heater going and the smell of the bakery still in his sleeves. From that spot you can see the third house up on the left. The gate that has never closed properly. The step his father laid badly in 1979 and was proud of anyway.

He had been parking there on and off for eleven years.

The falling out itself was not dramatic, which is somehow worse. His mother had a hip replaced. He was in a bad stretch that year, drinking more than he told anyone, and he did not come. Not on the day and not the week after. She rang twice. The second time he let it ring out because he could not think of a sentence that would survive being said, and then a week went by and a month went by, and the not-coming turned into a thing with its own weight, and after a while it was simply a fact about him, like his height.

He was sorry the entire time. That is the part people never believe. Eleven years of sorry, every single day, sorry in the van, sorry at four in the morning with the ovens roaring, sorry at Christmas, and none of it had ever once moved his hand to the door handle. He had begun to think that being sorry was just the shape his life was now, a room he lived in rather than a road he was on.

That Thursday in January there was frost on everything and the windows had gone opaque and he was scraping the inside of the windshield with a bank card when something small hit the door.

The dog. His mother's dog. A black terrier called Nell with gray coming in around her mouth, out on the road at half five in the morning, scratching at his car door because she knew the car.

He got out. He said her name out loud, which was the first thing he had said out loud on that road in eleven years. She was shivering hard and she was old, and there was nothing to decide about, so he picked her up inside his jacket and started walking up the hill because that was where she lived.

He did not decide to walk up the hill. That is the thing he could never explain afterward. He had spent eleven years trying to work himself up to a walk that in the end he simply took, holding somebody else's dog, because she was cold.

Halfway up, the porch light came on.

Then the door, and his mother in a dressing gown and one slipper, out on the step in the frost, and she did not say anything clever or anything terrible. She said his name.

The prayer that asks for the turning itself

There is a requirement that gets attached to coming back, and it is nowhere in the text. It goes like this: before you may return, you must produce the correct interior state. Enough remorse. Enough sincerity. A real change of heart, verified, ideally felt in the chest. And until that arrives, nobody is allowed to move, because moving without it would be cheap.

So people sit at the bottom of the road with the engine running, waiting to feel something they have no machinery for making.

Watch what the actual prayer looks like. In Jeremiah 31 a whole people is described as a young ox that will not take the yoke, and then the text puts a sentence in their mouth that changes what returning even is. They do not say: I have worked up the necessary feeling. They say something far more honest and far more desperate.

Turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God.Jeremiah 31:18

Turn me. Not I have turned, and not I will turn on Tuesday when I am stronger. Turn me. The turning itself is what is being asked for, which means the turning was never the entry fee. It was the gift.

You are being turned by Someone other than yourself, and that is the whole reason this is possible today. Jeremiah 31:3 puts it in the same chapter, drawn with lovingkindness, and it is His Spirit doing the drawing rather than your capacity to feel correctly about your own history.

Five verses later the prophet says something that will sit oddly if you were raised on shame. He says: after I was turned, I repented. In that order. The turning came first, and the change of heart followed it home.

Hosea says come, and let us return, and the reason he gives is not that the people have finally become sufficiently sorry. It is that God binds up and heals. Joel says turn to Me with all your heart, and then immediately explains why anyone would dare: for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness. The reason to turn is what He is like. Not what you have managed to become since the last time.

You have permission to come back today without a single new feeling in your possession. What is written says His goodness is what leads a person to turn, and the same Spirit who wrote that line through a prophet is the one nudging your hand toward the door handle right now.

And if you have turned a hundred times already, hear this carefully, because it is exactly the same. The hundredth turn is not a lesser event than the first. Nobody in the house counts. The father in the story ran, and the text does not tell us it was the son's first attempt at the road.