I Moved Nine Hundred Miles And Still

You did the arithmetic once, years ago, and it seemed sound.

Nine hundred miles. A day and a half of driving. Far enough that visits become events rather than obligations, far enough that nobody drops in, far enough that the whole apparatus of that family cannot reach across a table and take hold of your week.

And it worked, in the sense that you moved. You have a street outside a window and nobody on it knows any of them.

Then the phone rings on a Sunday and you are twelve years old again in about four seconds.

Nothing else changed. Same voice, same opening question, same silence in the same place, same feeling in your chest afterward that you have never once been able to name properly. Nine hundred miles of interstate did not touch it.

Nobody is going to tell you the move was a mistake

Let me say the obvious thing first, because you may be braced for it.

I am not going to tell you that you ran away. That is the sort of sentence people say about somebody else's life from a comfortable distance, and it is nearly always wrong. There are a hundred good reasons to move nine hundred miles and most of them are honorable, and at least one of yours probably was too.

And if part of why you left was that somebody in that family was harming you, then the move was not avoidance. It was sense, and there is nothing in this article that is asking you to go back into anything.

You were not a coward for leaving, and putting road between yourself and a house has never once been the same thing as running. Psalm 139 asks where a man could go from God's Spirit and answers that there is nowhere, which is the written word saying that presence follows a person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who follows for good rather than to hunt anybody down.

What I want to name is smaller and more specific. It is not that the move failed. It is that the move solved the wrong problem, and solving the wrong problem well is one of the loneliest experiences available to a person.

You moved the bodies. The bodies were never the issue.

You have been carrying the actual weight in your own chest the entire time, and mileage has never once been able to reach a thing that travels with you. The Spirit of God is what makes that a hopeful sentence rather than a crushing one, and it is written in Psalm 139:7 that there is nowhere a person can go where He is not already.

Where shall I go from thy spirit

Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? (Psalm 139:7, King James Version)

That verse gets read as a warning, and it is not one. Read the rest of the psalm and it is one of the tenderest things in the book. It is a man discovering that there is no address he could take that God would not already be at.

David runs through the options like a man checking exits. Heaven. Hell. The wings of the morning. The uttermost parts of the sea. And every one of them comes back the same way: even there shall thy hand lead me.

You are held in the place you moved to exactly as firmly as in the place you left, and God has never once had a shorter reach in one state than another. It is written in Psalm 139:7 that a man cannot flee the presence, which is the whole point of the passage, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is already standing in that unfamiliar kitchen.

Now turn it around, because this is the part that matters for you.

If the presence of God travels with you, so does everything else you did not put down before you loaded the truck. The move relocated your body. It did not relocate the twelve year old who answers that phone.

He was in the passenger seat the whole way.

You have never once been abandoned to that, and God has never left a man alone with a thing he could not get out of the car. The Spirit of God is the one who does the work distance cannot do, and Psalm 139 says the hand that leads is there in the uttermost parts of the sea as well as at home.

What the distance was actually for

Here is a way to hold this that is neither guilt nor denial.

The distance bought you something real. It bought you a room your family is not in. That is not nothing, and it may have been necessary, and it is a legitimate thing to have wanted.

What it could not buy you is a different reaction. A reaction is not geography. It is something rehearsed in a body over thirty years, and it fires in four seconds on a Sunday whether the caller is in the next street or two time zones away.

The reaction was already there before the truck was loaded, and the reaction is what came along.

You are able to notice the four seconds while they are happening, and naming a rehearsed thing has never once required anybody's permission. The Holy Spirit is the one who slows a moment down from the inside, and it is written in Psalm 139 that even there shall Thy hand lead me and Thy right hand shall hold me.

So the question is not whether to move back. Nobody here is telling you to move back, and nobody here is telling you to stay away either, because this site does not know your family and will not decide that for you.

The question is what happens in the four seconds.

You are able to be nine hundred miles away and still be entirely present to God in a Sunday phone call, and geography has never once determined what a man is free to feel. The Holy Spirit is what makes a rehearsed reaction stop being automatic, and it is written that even there shall thy hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me.

And your mother, or whoever it is on the other end of that call, is a person too. She has her own Sunday. She probably rehearsed her opening line, because people do. She may be right about one thing she says, and you will hear it as an attack because everything from her arrives on that frequency, and that is worth knowing even if you never say it to her.

That is not a case for the defense. It is just the fact that there is a second real human being on that phone.