Walking Back Up The Hill

Twenty two minutes down. An hour and ten back up. Ignacio had timed it so many times that he no longer needed the watch.

He lived at the top of the hill road, in the house with the blue water tank, and every evening at half past four he came down it with Perla trotting ahead of him and stopping every thirty meters to make sure he was still coming. Down past the water station. Down past the place where the asphalt gives up and turns to gravel. Down to where the road flattens out at the culvert, forty meters short of his son's gate.

He never went in.

Eleven years, and if you asked him to tell you how it happened he could not have given you an event. That was the whole trouble with it. There had been one bad Christmas, and then a birthday he did not call about because the first one had been awkward, and then a year where not calling had simply become the arrangement, and then it was just the way things were between them, the way a hill is the way it is. Nothing about it had ever felt like a decision. It had felt like walking downhill, which is not a thing you do so much as a thing you allow.

So he had made himself a plan, and he was proud of it in a way he would never have admitted.

The plan was that eleven years of silence had to be paid back in the same currency. He would be steady. He would send the birthday card with no note in it, so as not to push. He would be at the culvert every evening at six, in plain view, for as long as it took, and if Tobias ever wanted to come out to the gate then Tobias would know exactly where his father was standing. And then, in time, in a few more years perhaps, when enough of it had been repaid, he might have the standing to knock.

And every evening he turned around at the culvert and walked the hour and ten back up in the dark, and his knees hurt, and some part of him was satisfied by that. It felt like the correct exchange rate. A man does not get eleven years back in an afternoon.

It was a Tuesday in November when the mill whistle went at six and the truck was already at the gate.

Green, dented on the near side, engine running, headlights on in the half dark. Tobias was standing at the driver's door with his arms folded on the roof.

"Get in, Pa."

Ignacio stopped in the road. "I can walk it."

"I know you can walk it." His son opened the passenger door from the inside, leaning across. "I have been coming down here at six for two weeks. You are not getting any faster."

Two weeks.

And that was the thing that took the legs out from under Ignacio, standing in the gravel with the dog going in circles around him. Not the offer. Not even the voice. It was the arithmetic going the wrong way: that while he had been out here paying off a debt in twenty two minute installments, somebody had been coming down to the bottom of the hill to look for him.

He got in. The heater was on and the cab smelled like sawdust. And in the door pocket there was a thermos, and next to the thermos there were two cups.

It had been packed for two.

A turn is a direction, and it does not have a length

Here is the sentence that has been quietly running your life, and I want to say it out loud so you can look at it.

It took me this long to get here, so it is going to take me that long to get back.

It sounds humble. It sounds like a man taking responsibility, and half the people who love you would nod at it. But look at what it actually does: it takes a road you slid down without deciding anything, and it turns the way home into a project you have to fund. And nobody can fund it, so nobody starts, and the whole thing calcifies into eleven years of being sorry at a culvert.

Now read what the man in Acts actually says to a crowd who had been part of the worst week in history.

Repent ye therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out, when the times of refreshing shall come from the presence of the Lord.Acts 3:19

Repent and turn. That is it. There is no length in that sentence. There is no schedule attached to it, no minimum period, no proving phase, and Peter was talking to people whose situation was considerably worse than yours.

You have a turn available to you that costs no time at all, because Scripture attaches no distance to it. It is His Spirit doing this, not my wording. He is what makes a turning body into a coming home.

The prophets say the same thing, and they say it with an arm around the shoulder. Come, and let us return unto the LORD, says Hosea, and notice he says us, standing inside it with the people rather than pointing at them from a step above. And Joel, who could have opened with the failure, opens with the invitation: turn to me with all your heart, and rend your heart and not your garments, for He is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness.

Great kindness. That is the motive named in the text. Not exhaustion, not shame, not a warning about how much time is left. The prophets never once say come back because you should be ashamed. They say come back because of what He is like.

And then there is the son who worked out an installment plan on the road home.

He had a speech and he had rehearsed it, and there is a proposal in the middle of it: make me as one of thy hired servants. That is not humility. That is arithmetic. That is a young man who has decided that the way back into a family is a payment schedule and he had better be the one to name the terms before somebody else does.

He never gets to finish it. While he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran.

You are the one being run at. That is not a nice sentiment I have added, it is what Luke 15:20 says happened, and the same Spirit who moved that man to write it down is moving in the room you are sitting in now.

And notice where the father was standing when it happened. Not at the top of the hill with his arms folded, waiting to see whether the boy had the stamina. He was out where he could see the road. He had been out there for a while. The father in that story is the only character who does any running.

Which is why Jesus could say, flatly, that no one comes to Him unless the Father draws him. Your turning is not you generating enough momentum to overcome eleven years of drift. It is you responding to a pull that was already on you, and that pull is the reason you are still reading a message about coming home instead of watching something else.

You were being drawn on every one of those evenings you counted as wasted. What is written is that the goodness of God leads a man to a change of heart, and His Spirit has been that goodness working on you for longer than you have been aware of it.