The Ground I Do Not Have

There is a pause Emilio does before he answers where he is from, and he has been doing it for nineteen years and he can hear himself doing it.

It is about half a second. Long enough for him to decide which answer this particular person wants, and short enough that nobody has ever remarked on it.

He has three answers. There is the short one, which is the name of the town he lives in now, and which is true and which people accept. There is the medium one, which involves the name of the country he was born in and usually produces a follow-up question he has answered several thousand times. And there is the long one, which is accurate, and which he has given perhaps four times in his life, all of them late at night and all of them to people who had also left somewhere.

He is fifty-two. He left when he was thirty-three, and he did not want to, and that is all I am going to say about the reasons because they are his.

He has a life here. It is a good one. His daughters are from here in a way that he will never be, and he is glad about that and it is also the loneliest sentence in his life, and both of those are permanently true at once.

He cannot go back. Not in the sense of being forbidden; in the sense that the place he would go back to has not existed for a long time, and the one that is there now is somewhere he would be a visitor.

So there is no ground.

That is how he would put it, if he ever put it to anybody. Everybody he knows is standing on something. His neighbor has been in that house since he was born. His daughters have a place they mean when they say home and it is here and they do not think about it.

And Emilio stands on a half second pause.

At certain hours, which for him is early rather than late, one sentence arrives.

I did not choose this and I am standing in it on my own.

You may know that pause.

Maybe you left. Maybe your parents did and you inherited it, which is its own version. Maybe you never went anywhere and the place you are from changed underneath you, which is a leaving that does not even get a name.

What I am not going to do

Let me be plain, because this is a subject on which everybody has an opinion and most of them are not about you.

I am not going to make an argument about any of it. Not about why people leave, not about what should happen, not about anybody's policy. This is not that kind of article and it is not that kind of site, and you did not come here to be recruited to a position on a thing that is happening to you.

I am not going to tell you God arranged for you to leave. I do not believe it and I will not write it.

I am not going to ask you what you have learned from nineteen years of being from nowhere. That question, asked of a man with a half second pause, is a small cruelty in good clothes.

And I am not going to tell you it gets better, or that you will eventually feel from here, because I do not know and your daughters are the evidence that it does not always work like that.

One thing.

A man in the middle of nowhere

There is a moment in Genesis where a man is running, has nothing, and stops for the night in a place with no name because it got dark and he could not go further.

He uses a stone for a pillow, which tells you everything about the accommodation.

And in the morning he says this.

Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.Genesis 28:16

Look at the two halves of that sentence, because both matter.

The LORD is in this place. Not in the place he came from, which he had left, and not in the place he was going, which he had not reached. In the nowhere in between, on the ground that belonged to nobody, where he had stopped only because the light went.

And I knew it not. He had been there all night. Asleep. Not doing anything, not praying, not qualifying. The presence was not produced by his noticing it and it was not absent during the hours he did not notice.

And He is in the place you are standing and it is not the wrong place. The written word puts the presence in an unnamed piece of ground between two countries, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a man who has been standing on a half second pause for nineteen years.

And you have not been unaccompanied through the years you did not notice. The word has him asleep for the whole of it and the presence unaffected by that, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than requiring you to have registered anything.

The two true things

Now let me hold the two sentences you carry, and I want to hold both without dissolving either, because people usually make you drop one.

My daughters are from here. That is a good thing. You are glad. You would not undo it.

And I will never be. That is a loss and it is permanent and it does not get smaller because the first sentence is good.

People will try to make you trade. They will offer you the first one as compensation for the second, and it does not work as compensation, and being handed it as compensation makes it slightly worse.

You do not have to trade. Both are true and they will stay true, and a man is allowed to hold a joy and a grief in the same hand without either one being an argument against the other.

And you are allowed both of those without one canceling the other. The word says weep with them that weep and rejoice with them that do rejoice, and it puts them in the same sentence without embarrassment, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man do both about the same afternoon.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a man who has quietly wondered if the grief is ungrateful.