My Brother Is Getting on That Bus

Stand six, bay four, twenty past five, and it says on the board that it is on time.

He has a rucksack and the good coat you gave him at Christmas and he is wearing it, which you have noticed and are not going to mention.

He told you on Tuesday. He did not sneak off and he did not lie about it, and both of those are new, and you know exactly how much they cost him.

He said he is going back. He said the name of the city and the name of the man he is going back to work for, and he said both of them looking straight at you.

And then he said the thing you have been carrying since Tuesday: do not do the speech.

You have done the speech twice. Once at a kitchen table four years ago, for about two hours, and it worked, and he stayed eleven months. Once in a car in a hospital car park, which was shorter and worse and also worked, for a while.

He is thirty-six. He knows every single thing you would say, because you have said all of it to him already and he can do it in your voice.

So you have not done the speech. You drove him here and you carried the bag and you bought him a coffee he did not drink and you have said almost nothing for forty minutes.

Nine minutes on the board.

He said through, and not around

Stand here with me a minute. Nine minutes is longer than it feels. I am not going to hand you a better version of the speech.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not have me pretending at a man at a bus station: you are not overreacting. You know what that city is and you know what it has cost him twice, and I am not going to be optimistic at you about a bus.

And there is a thing I will not do at all, and it needs saying before anything else, because somebody will offer it to you before the week is out. I will not give you words to speak at your brother's will. Nothing in this article, and nothing on this site, is a way of turning a grown man round with a sentence. His will is his own before God. It is not a mountain and it is not available to be commanded, and anybody who hands you a form of words to aim at your brother's decision is handing you a spell, and it will not work, and it would be wrong if it did.

Now come and look at a promise about water, and look at the one word in it that everybody wishes said something else.

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

Through. Three times. Through the waters, through the rivers, through the fire.

Not around. Not instead of. Not I will keep you out of it, which is what everybody wants that verse to say and what it conspicuously does not say.

God does not promise the absence of the water. He promises His presence in it. And He says it to people who were about to go through exactly the thing they had been dreading, and He does not pretend otherwise for one word of it.

Your brother is going into water and there is a promise made for people in water, and it was never a promise about the water not being there. That is not me softening a bus timetable. That is what is written, and which preposition it uses three times, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it at stand six on a Thursday afternoon.

Here is what nobody explains at a stand like this one. When you speak a blessing over him, you are not stopping him and you are not making a last bid. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a man He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He is already in that city, and He does not need a ticket and He is not waiting for your brother to be in better shape.

A blessing is the one thing you can say in the next nine minutes that is not the speech. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word from heaven onto a bus and off it again at the other end.

Why he asked you not to do the speech

Now let me name it, because it is not that he does not want to hear it and it is not that he does not respect you.

The speech worked. Both times. That is the whole problem.

What is written never handed you that job, and the Spirit has never worked that way. Twice, you have talked a man out of a decision he had made, and both times he came back and stayed, and both times he left again, and both times he had to leave in a way that involved lying to you first, because the speech had made a straight departure impossible.

This time he told you on Tuesday, to your face, with the name of the city in it.

That is not a worse thing. That is a considerably better thing, and it cost him something, and asking you not to do the speech is the price of it. He is trying to leave honestly. It is the first time.

That is not a reason to be pleased about a bus, and I am not going to dress it up as one. It is a reason to see what he is actually handing you in these nine minutes, which is himself, straight, with nothing hidden.

God has not appointed you to hold your brother out of that city, and He has never once made an older brother's persuasion the thing a man's life turns on. It is written that every one of us shall give account of himself to God (Romans 14:12), himself, which is God giving that man his own file, and the same Spirit who breathed it is standing at this stand with you.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you he will be all right. I have no authority to promise you that and I would not, and you would know. And I am not telling you a blessing keeps him safe on that bus; it is not a charm and it is not insurance and if it becomes either of those it has stopped being what this is.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said over him at bay four that goes with him and asks nothing of him. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and twenty words said to a man with a rucksack is not the speech and it is not nothing.