a bird that wandereth from her nest

Friends came over for dinner. My youngest was sick and stayed downstairs.

Christie set her place anyway. Plate. Fork. Everything. Just in case.

I walked into the dining room the next morning and there it was. One plate. One fork. One empty chair.

I stood there a while.

Then it hit me that I had seen that chair before. From the other side.

I was the empty chair.

Proverbs 27, and today is the 27th.

“As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place.”

Every man has a place. God put him in it.

A bird outside the nest is not free. It is food.

Here is what my wandering looked like. I am going to be specific, because “I worked too much” is what a man says when he does not want to count it.

I’ve worked many Fourteen-hour shifts. Two and three jobs at a time. 20 some odd years. Long hour weeks were normal.

You know what day I got off? Sunday.

Church nine to one. Back again five to six thirty.

One day a week with my family. Half of it already spoken for.

“That is not wandering. That is working.”

That is what I said too.

There is a verse in 1 Kings I cannot get away from. A man is handed one prisoner to guard. One job. He loses him. The king asks what happened, and here is the entire excuse, word for word:

“As thy servant was busy here and there, he was gone.”

Busy here and there.

Not drunk. Not asleep. Not out with a woman. Busy.

He had things to do, and the thing he was told to keep walked off while he was doing them.

That is the most honest sentence about my thirties in the whole Bible.

Nobody wanders on purpose.

Now watch what the Book does with the word place.

Judas. “That he might go to his own place.” Even Judas had one. He went to it.

The angels. “Which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation.” They had a habitation. They left it. They are in chains about it.

David. “At the time when kings go forth to battle... But David tarried still at Jerusalem.” He was out of his place before he was ever on that roof. What happened on the roof was the second thing that went wrong.

Gideon’s three hundred. “And they stood every man in his place round about the camp.” Nobody moved. That is how the army broke.

And the first question God ever asked a man in the garden was not what have you done.

“Where art thou?”

Where are you.

I told myself I was providing.

This is what a man does.

They will understand when they are older.

They got older.

I watched my older kids start to leave. Not leave me. Just leave. Grow up. Move on.

Sometimes, I look back on missed opportunities when I was worried, or busy with now vain things.

(I am writing about a man’s place from a chair I bought with money I earned by being gone. I do not know how to say that in a way that does not sting, so I am going to leave it there.)

The thing you are providing for matters more than the providing.

I was so focused on keeping them fed that I forgot to be at the table.

Gave them a roof. And sometimes didn’t sit under it with them.

Their future mattered. I missed their present.

Your family is the mission. Not the reward for finishing the mission. The mission.

Most men cannot get back to their place because nobody ever told them where it was. They were handed a paycheck and a pat on the back and told that was headship.

It is not.

Christie still made my plate on the nights I didn’t get home in time.

Just in case.

I do not deserve that and I am not going to pretend I do.

The nest is still there. Most of the time the nest is still there.

Where art thou.

-Adam