The Ticket She Did Not Use

The ticket is in the second drawer of the dresser, under the dish towels, and Nadine has renewed it twice.

It is a flight home. Open return, changeable, and every time it gets close to lapsing she pays the fee and moves the date and puts it back under the dish towels.

She has been here nine years. She has a job at the hospital and a car and a church and a friend called Yvette who is closer to her than most of her family. She is not in trouble. Nobody is making her stay and nobody is making her go.

She came out of an arrangement back home in 2016 and it is the reason she is here, and how it ended is not this article's business except to say that it ended and she got on a plane.

Here is what the ticket is.

It is not a plan. She has no intention of using it. If you asked her outright whether she is going back she would say no, immediately, and she would mean it.

It is a door. It is the knowledge that the door is there, which is a different thing from wanting to walk through it. And the knowledge has been costing about two hundred dollars a year in change fees for nine years, and she has never once told anybody about it, including Yvette.

Here is the day it caught.

She was looking for a dish towel, actually looking for a dish towel, and Yvette was in the kitchen with her and said, "What's that?"

And Nadine said, "Old paperwork."

And Yvette said, "That's a boarding thing."

And Nadine shut the drawer.

You know that. Something in a drawer, or a folder, or a savings account, that is not a plan and is not nothing, and that you have kept alive at a small ongoing cost for years, and that you have never explained to a single person.

He describes it in detail

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to throw the ticket away. I do not know your life and I am not going to reach into a woman's drawer from behind a screen. I am not going to tell you to go home either, and I am not going to give anybody a verdict on 2016.

What I will do is read you what God says about a place before anybody has set foot in it.

For the LORD thy God bringeth thee into a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.Deuteronomy 8:7

Read the next two verses in a Bible if there is one nearby, because they go on. Wheat and barley. Vines and fig trees and pomegranates. Olive oil and honey. Bread without scarceness. Stones of iron and hills where brass can be dug.

That is a great deal of detail about a country nobody in the room had entered.

And look at who is doing the describing. Not Moses out of enthusiasm. God, through him, at length, physically, in the language of water and food and rock.

You are being brought into somewhere that has already been described in detail by the One bringing you, and the description came before anybody arrived. Deuteronomy 8:7 has Him listing brooks and fountains and depths before a foot crossed the river, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen with a drawer in it.

And notice what He is doing by describing it that way. He is making it real. Not aspirational. Not spiritual. Wheat. Iron. Honey. A person can imagine standing in that.

You have not been handed a vague promise, and the specificity in that passage is deliberate rather than decorative. It is written that He brings them into a land of brooks and fountains and depths, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient description something a person can actually put weight on.

The door is not the problem

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

The ticket is not faithlessness. It is not a lack of commitment, and it is not a woman hedging on God. I want that in a whole sentence, because Nadine has half-decided it is, and the half-deciding is why Yvette has never been told.

Here is what a door in a drawer actually is, for somebody who came out of something in a hurry.

It is a reversal of the worst part. The worst part of 2016 was not the leaving. It was that there was no choice in it. And a woman who once had to move without options will, often, keep one option alive at some expense for a very long time, and that is not weakness, that is a person restoring the thing that was taken.

You have been holding a choice rather than an escape, and Scripture never once treats the keeping of an option as disloyalty. Deuteronomy 8:7 has God describing a land to people who could physically have turned around at any point in forty years, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a preserved option from being read as a divided heart.

But here is the thing I do want to name, because nine years is a long time.

While the ticket is in the drawer, this place is provisional. Not consciously. But a woman who keeps a door open does not fully describe the room she is standing in, because describing it would be a kind of agreement, and the door exists precisely so that agreement stays optional.

And that is why she can tell you every detail of home and would struggle to tell you three physical things about here.

You are permitted to describe where you are standing without it costing you the door, and the two were never actually connected. Deuteronomy 8:7 describes a destination in physical detail without one word about anybody's freedom to leave, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a description from a surrender.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the nine years have gone somewhere heavier than unsettled, or if the ticket has become something you check on more than you would want to admit, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Yvette, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about home or about 2016. That is me refusing to leave you standing at that drawer by yourself.