I Drove All Night And Did Not Find Him

Ikaika left at ten past eight in the evening and got home at twenty past nine the next morning and did not find his brother.

He had four places. That was the whole of the plan and he knew it was thin when he made it: a house that a man he half knows used to stay at, a stretch of road near a set of shops, a parking lot behind a building that was mentioned once in a message eight months ago, and the hospital, which he left until last because leaving it until last was the only way he could get in the truck.

The first three had nobody in them. The fourth had a woman at a desk who was kind and told him, correctly and gently, that she could not tell him anything.

He drove home with the sun coming up over the water on his left and he pulled in at a gas station about forty minutes out and sat there for a while.

Here is what he cannot get past, and it has been six days.

He is thirty-one. He took a day off work he could not really take. He put three hundred and something miles on a truck. He was awake for thirty-one hours.

And nothing happened. Nothing at all. No outcome, no scene, no confrontation, no rescue. He went out and came back and everything is precisely as it was, and his mother asked him at the door and he had to say no, and watch her face do the thing it did.

What was any of that for? Am I just a man who drove around all night making himself feel like he was doing something?

And here is where I stop talking about Ikaika, because you went looking too. Maybe not in a truck. And you came back with nothing and you have been quietly filing it as a failure.

Let me name the wound before I do anything else with it. You are not being scored, and there is no version of this where the search was only worth something if you found him. Somebody needs to say that to you plainly, because you have not been able to say it to yourself for six days.

The going after is God's own instinct

Let me set the true thing down first, because it is about what was actually in you at ten past eight that evening.

You are not foolish and you were not performing. The impulse that put you in that truck is not a human weakness that needs managing. It is the exact instinct Jesus used to describe God: And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, does not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?Luke 15:4

Notice how the question is put. Jesus does not argue that the shepherd should go. He asks it as though only a madman would not, and then He builds the whole rest of the chapter on the assumption that everybody listening agrees.

And then look at who the shepherd in that story turns out to be.

Now let me be careful with you, because this is where people say more than they were given and it wounds families. That verse is about the heart of God and the way He seeks. It is not a promise about a date, and I am not going to hand you a guarantee about your brother, because I have not been given one and nobody who offers you one has either.

What it does tell you, with certainty, is this: the going after is not your invention. It is God's own instinct and it was in you in that truck, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own sympathy, and God's Spirit did not think that night was ridiculous.

Nothing is not the same as nothing

Now let me deal with the accounting, because you have been doing it wrong for six days and it is crushing you.

You measured that night against one outcome: finding him. On that measure it scored zero, and so you have written it off, and the writing off has turned into a question about what kind of man you are. The Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into the room you are actually in.

Try measuring the same night honestly.

Four places were checked and now nobody has to wonder about them. A woman at a hospital desk saw a brother come in at four in the morning and ask, and whatever she thinks about the world, she has now seen that. If your brother ever hears that somebody drove all night looking, and people do hear these things eventually, that is a fact that will exist in him for the rest of his life whether he ever mentions it or not.

And your mother, who is not asking you to find him, saw her son go, and knows what that means about her family, and will remember it when she is old.

None of that is the outcome you wanted. All of it is real, and none of it evaporates because the truck came home empty.

So hear this: you are not a man who was pretending to do something. You are a man in whom the seeking instinct of God was operating on a Tuesday night, and God has not asked you to produce a result to justify it. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it something you can put down rather than something you would like to believe at a gas station.

And the plain half, because a message without it has failed you. There is real help for you and none of it is small faith. Family groups for people who love somebody using are full of people who have driven those nights, and there is nothing you could say in that room that has not been said in it. A counselor for you is not giving up on him. Sleep, and eat, and let somebody know when you go looking, because a man who goes out alone at ten past eight with four places and no plan is also somebody's brother. And if he is ever found in danger, get medical help immediately, and in the United States you or he can call or text 988 at any hour.