The Night Bus at Twenty To Seven

The number 9 comes past the end of Tomás's road at twenty to seven, and for two years it was the most important object in his life.

He knows its noise. He knows the particular grind it makes coming up the hill in the wet, which is different from the noise it makes in the dry, and he knows that the driver on Tuesdays lets you on with the wrong ticket and the driver on Thursdays does not. He knows which seat by the middle door you can sleep in without falling into the aisle.

For two years he ate at ten past six standing up, put his boots on at half past, and stood under that shelter at twenty to seven with a flask in a carrier bag.

In January it stopped.

Nothing dramatic happened. The thing that had needed a second wage stopped needing one, quietly, on an ordinary weekday, and he came home and told his wife and they both stood in the kitchen not quite knowing what to say, because you cannot really cheer about the end of something you never celebrated the start of.

The first Tuesday was strange. He did not mind strange.

It is August now, and here is what happens on a Tuesday in that house.

He finishes his tea at ten past six. He washes up, which takes about nine minutes and which he does thoroughly, and by twenty past he is standing at the kitchen window with a tea towel in his hand looking at the garden. At half past he puts his boots on. He does not decide to. They go on.

And at twenty to seven he is at the end of the road, under the shelter, with no flask and no bag and nowhere on earth to be, and the number 9 comes up the hill and slows down because the driver can see a man standing there, and Tomás lifts a hand to say no, and it pulls away, and he walks back up the road to his own front door.

He has done this most Tuesdays since March.

If you asked his wife she would say he seems better, and she would be right. If you asked him he would say he is fine, and he would be telling the truth as far as he can see it. He is not sad. He is not in trouble. He goes to work, he sleeps, he laughs at the football.

It is just that between six and ten at night there is a shape of time that used to have a bus in it, and now there is nothing in it, and he genuinely does not know what an evening is for.

Not what to put in it. What it is FOR.

And here is where I stop talking about Tomás, because you have your own version and you know exactly which hours it lives in.

Maybe it is not a bus. Maybe it is that you still eat standing up. Maybe it is that you cannot sit down in your own front room without the telly on, or that when somebody asks you what you did last night you say nothing and it comes out like an apology.

The hours came back. Nobody handed you a use for them.

An evening is not a gap in the rota

I want to walk you into one line of a psalm, and I want to warn you first that it is going to look too small for the size of the problem.

For You have delivered my life from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling. I will walk before the face of the Lord in the land of the living.Psalm 116:8-9

The man who wrote that had just come out of something. Psalm 116 opens with the cords of death and the grip of the grave, and by the ninth verse he is not describing a rescue any more, he is describing a walk. And the Holy Spirit did not put that line down as a report from a survivor. You are the one standing in it tonight at twenty to seven, and the psalm is aimed at exactly that hour.

Now ask what he says he is going to do with the land of the living, because it is not what a man would put in a report. He does not say he will make something of it. He does not say he will justify being spared. He says he will walk in it, before the face of God, which is the phrase Scripture keeps for ordinary company rather than for inspection. You have His company in an evening with nothing in it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a fact instead of a nice sentiment.

That word walk is doing quiet work. A walk has no output. Nobody has ever finished a walk and been asked what they got done. A walk is what you do when the destination is not the point and the company is, and the psalmist picks it deliberately in the same breath as saying his feet were kept from stumbling, because feet that have been kept are feet that are allowed to go slowly.

The Holy Spirit is not standing at the end of your road with a clipboard. He is standing on Psalm 116 and saying the word living over a man who has been alive without living since the September before last. You are in the land of the living at twenty to seven on a Tuesday with a tea towel still in your hand, and it does not become the land of the living at the moment you finally think of something to fill it with.

Somebody taught you, probably without ever putting it into words, that time only counts when it is spent on something. That is why an empty evening feels like an accusation and a shift feels like peace. But the word never says he filled the land of the living. It says he walked in it, and the Spirit is pressing that difference into you as you read, because it is the whole difference between a life and a rota.