They All Left The Island

The harbor road runs flat and straight for about a mile past the fuel dock before it climbs, and at this time of year the sun goes down right at the end of it, so that for ten minutes the whole road is a corridor of gold and you cannot see the potholes, and Gil parks the van in the gravel turnout and sits in it with the engine off until the light goes.

He has done that on Tuesday nights for eleven years.

He drives the youth group. Not runs it, drives it. He collects them from the four ends of the island in a fifteen seat van with a sliding door that has needed a proper repair since before the pandemic, and he takes them to whatever is on, and he takes them home again, and he has done this every Tuesday except for the three weeks after his knee.

He is fifty nine. He was never asked to do it in a formal way. There was a minibus and a license and nobody else with either, and that was fourteen years ago, and after three years it was just a thing about him.

He knows the exact patch of road where Sammy Doig used to make everybody sing. He knows which seat Rina sat in and which seat she moved to when she was fifteen and something had happened that she never said. He knows that the Barlow twins always sat at the front and argued the entire way and that one of them cried once, going home, and Gil turned the radio up so nobody would hear it, and never mentioned it, not once, not in eight years.

Sammy Doig is in a city eight hundred miles away and works in insurance. Rina is on the mainland with two children. The twins are both gone, one to the army and one somewhere Gil is not sure about. Delia went to the university and did not come back. Owen went to the mainland at nineteen and came back at twenty two for a funeral and went again on the Sunday ferry.

Every single one of them left.

The youth group is four kids now. It was nineteen once. It is four, and one of them only comes because his mother makes him, and Gil still does the four ends of the island, which takes fifty five minutes for four passengers, and he still parks in the turnout on the way home and sits until the gold goes off the road.

He is not bitter. He would tell you, if you got him talking, which is not easy, that they were right to go. There is nothing here. There has not been anything here since the cannery, and any parent on this island who tells you different is lying to their own child. He is glad they went. He drove two of them to the ferry himself.

But the thing that sits in the cab with him in the turnout is not about them going.

It is this: eleven years, and he cannot point at one thing. Not one. He drove them and they left. If you asked him what any of it was for he would go quiet and then he would say something about how it kept them off the road on a Tuesday, and then he would change the subject, and he would think about it later that night for longer than he would admit.

Last week he found a hair tie under the third row seat. Blue, stretched out, somebody's from years ago. He put it in the glovebox. He could not have told you why.

He knoweth not how

There is a very short parable in Mark that gets skipped because it does not have anything dramatic in it, and it is the most useful thing in Scripture for a man sitting in a turnout.

And should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.Mark 4:27

He knoweth not how. That is not a confession of ignorance and it is not a failure in the man. It is the design. Jesus tells it as a description of how the kingdom actually works: the seed goes in, the man goes on with his life, sleeping and getting up and sleeping again, and the ground does the rest without consulting him, and he does not have access to the process. The next verse says the earth brings forth fruit of herself. Of herself. Not of his monitoring.

You have a Lord who grows what goes in the ground, and Mark 4:27 has the man sleeping straight through it. I am not saying that to make eleven years easier to file. It is written, and the not knowing is inside the written line rather than being the disappointing part outside it. And the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a report to come back to the island before He calls a thing fruitful.

So look again at what has actually been counted in that cab.

The count is: who is still here. That is the whole instrument. Eleven years measured by the ferry, which is a measure of geography and employment and the price of a room, and which has never at any point measured what went into anybody. A boy crying in the back of a van in the dark while the radio goes up is not a data point that shows up anywhere on the island, and it did not stop being real when he moved away.

You were the one who drove, and the driving was the entire whole of your part. Mark 4:26 has the man casting seed into the ground and the sentence stops there, because Scripture assigns him nothing further. What the Spirit adds is that this is not a consolation prize for a man who wanted results. It is the actual job description, and you have been doing it accurately for eleven years.

What the not knowing is

Now the part that matters most, and it needs saying carefully because it is where this kind of message usually goes wrong.

Nobody here is going to tell you that they will all come back, or that Sammy Doig thinks about you, or that a letter is on its way. I do not know any of that and neither does anybody else, and a promise like that is somebody spending your hope on a guess. It would also miss the point of the parable by a mile, because Mark 4:27 does not say the man finds out later. It says he does not know how, and it never resolves that, and the parable is at peace with it in a way that people almost never are.

You are lit by Christ, and no ferry schedule on earth has ever had a vote on that. John 8:12 says Jesus is the light of the world and Matthew 5:14 turns and says the same sentence over ordinary people who were not tracking anything. The word said it first. The Spirit says it again, in a gravel turnout, with the engine off.

Here is what the not knowing actually is, once you stop reading it as an absence.

It is the shape of a thing that is too far away to see. A seed in the ground is invisible for a reason, and the reason is not that nothing is happening. When Isaiah 55:11 says the word that goes out of His mouth does not come back empty, it is describing something that is true whether or not anybody on the island is in a position to observe it. That is not a hopeful reading. It is what the sentence says.

You have eleven years of Tuesdays that are in the ground, and the written word is where that is settled rather than the ferry manifest. Scripture put the growing in God's column and the sleeping in yours. And His Spirit is the one who makes an old parable land in a man of fifty nine with a stretched out hair tie in his glovebox.