He Wanted to Get in the Boat

He has been on eleven of them. He can list them and he could tell you the year of each one, and he is not showing off when he does, because to him they are not a list, they are the eleven times he has been sure.

The build in the second year. The one with the flooding. Two summers running with the same team, and the year the truck broke down and they slept in a school hall for four nights, which is still the best week of his life.

He is thirty six.

And in March he found out that the one he wanted, the one he has been aiming at for four years, the one that needed his exact trade and would have been eleven weeks, has gone to somebody else.

The reasons were reasonable. Everybody involved was decent about it. He said the right things.

And he came home and he has been strange in his own house since, and his wife has noticed and has not said anything and is going to.

Here is what he has not told anybody. It is not disappointment about a trip. He has been disappointed before and it does not sit like this.

It is that when he is out there he knows exactly what he is for, and when he is here he does not, and eleven weeks would have been eleven weeks of knowing.

He is very good at this house. He is not neglectful and nobody is being let down and he would be genuinely offended if anybody suggested it. He does bedtimes. He fixes things. He is in the room.

He just does not feel it here. He feels it in a school hall in another country at two in the morning with a broken truck, and he has never once said that out loud, because he can hear how it would sound.

The hall on a Wednesday, with the tables pushed into a line and paper plates and four families, is a good evening and he is at it and he is not in it.

There is a man in Mark who begged to get in a boat, and everybody remembers the pigs and nobody remembers what he was told.

Go home to thy friends

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally hands over a duty. Your family is your mission field. Your first ministry is at home. I am not going to do that. Those sentences are true and they are also the fastest way to turn a man's own kitchen into an assignment he is failing at, and a man who already does not feel it here does not need a new place to underperform.

In Mark 5 a man is delivered, and it is the most dramatic deliverance in the Gospels, and at the end of it the town asks Jesus to leave.

And as he is getting into the ship, the man who had been possessed prayed him that he might be with him (Mark 5:18). He begged. That is what the word means. He wanted to get in the boat.

Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee, and hath had compassion on thee (Mark 5:19).

Read that as what it is. The one man in the region with the most reason to follow and the least reason to stay is told to stay. Not because he is unfit. Because there is something there for him to do that nobody else in the world can do.

You have been sent somewhere rather than kept back from somewhere. That is not me making a refusal sound better; Mark 5:19 has a positive instruction with a destination in it and the Holy Spirit who preserved that line recorded a commission and not a consolation.

And then look at verse 20: And he departed, and began to publish in Decapolis how great things Jesus had done for him: and all men did marvel. He does it. In ten cities. The whole region hears, because the man who wanted the boat stayed on the shore.

Howbeit Jesus suffered him not, but saith unto him, Go home to thy friends, and tell them how great things the Lord hath done for thee.Mark 5:19

Knowing what you are for

Now the thing he has not said out loud, because it is the actual subject and it is not about a trip.

Out there he knows what he is for. Here he does not.

That is real and it is not a character defect. A build in another country has a shape: a start, a job, a team, a finish, and a moment on the last afternoon where you look at a thing that was not there before. Fatherhood does not have that shape. A marriage does not have that shape. Nothing at that hall on a Wednesday has that shape.

So the feeling arrives out there and does not arrive here, and he has been reading the feeling as a verdict about where he belongs.

You were never going to feel it in the shape you get it out there. Mark 5:19 sends a man home with a commission and the passage records no farewell scene, no send off and no equivalent moment; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) gave a man a job with no last afternoon in it.

This is yours right now, at a table with paper plates: an assignment with a destination on it. Mark 5:19 names the destination as home and the audience as friends; the Spirit who preserved that line put a man's own road in the instruction.

Ten cities out of a shore

Let me stay with what happened next, because it is the answer to the thing he is afraid of.

He is afraid, though he would not use the word, that staying is the smaller thing. That the boat was the real work and the shore is what you get instead.

Mark 5:20 says the man published it in Decapolis, which is ten cities, and that all men marveled. The region that had just asked Jesus to leave got the whole account of what He had done, from a man who was there when it happened, because he was told to stay.

Nothing in that chapter suggests he did the lesser work. He did the work that only somebody who stayed could do.

You have a reach from your own road that a boat does not have. Mark 5:20 records ten cities from one man who stayed home; the Holy Spirit who preserved that outcome put the scale of it in the verse immediately after the instruction.

Fruit is not output, and eleven trips is where the difference is clearest. Output is the build: photographable, finished, and with a last afternoon. Fruit is what grows in a house over years with no completion date anywhere in it, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, in a school hall or a kitchen.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the drive home from that hall, tell Him one true thing about March with nothing asked for and nothing requested. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody measures that.