The Last Bus Home

Upstairs, front seat, left hand side. Nobody sits there after about nine o'clock except her and, two rows back, a man asleep with his head against the glass.

The window is cold. There is a wet mark on it where somebody's forehead was earlier. Her own reflection is on it too, doubled and slightly off, and past the reflection the town is going by in the way it does at that hour: a chip shop putting the metal shutter down, a bus stop with nobody at it, a gas station with all its lights on for absolutely nobody.

She is sitting perfectly still. Not tense. Still, like something switched off.

Her phone is in her hand and it has been for twenty minutes without being unlocked. In the group chat there are forty-one messages about somebody's kitchen extension, and one of them is a laughing face, and further up there is a photograph of a dog wearing a hat.

She heard at twenty to eleven this morning.

Then she worked until six, because that is what was on the calendar. Then she went to the thing she had said months ago that she would go to, and she stood with a paper cup and asked two people about their holiday and listened to the answers. She got the bus at ten to eleven at night, and here she is, upstairs at the front, watching the shutter come down on a chip shop.

And her coat is buttoned wrong.

Not slightly. Properly wrong, one hole out, all the way up, so the whole front of it hangs crooked, and she did that at seven fifteen this morning before any of it happened, and she has been like that all day. Through work. Through the thing with the paper cups.

Nobody said anything. Fourteen hours and nobody said, love, your coat.

That is not a story about how nobody cares. That is a story about how it is possible to walk through an entire day with everything wrong and nothing show, and everybody else was busy being in their own day, the way everybody always is, the way she is in theirs.

That is you.

Maybe it was a train, a night shift, a car on the drive with the engine off for twenty minutes. Maybe it is a house with people in it, which is the version nobody expects, because a room with four people in it can be the loneliest place on the earth on a day like today.

Two things before we go on, and neither one is negotiable.

Nobody is going to explain today to you here. And nobody is going to suggest, in any wording however gentle, that this is your own doing: that you should have said something, that you have shut people out, that you are hard to reach. You are not being told to reach out. Nothing about tonight is a report card on your relationships, and nobody here is grading them.

Read the preposition

There is a line in the psalms about trouble, and the whole weight of it is sitting on one small word that people skip.

He shall call upon me, and I will answer him: I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him, and honour him.Psalm 91:15

In trouble. Not after it. Not instead of it. Not once it is dealt with and everybody has calmed down. In.

I am not going to tell you what the deliverance in that verse looks like in your situation, or when, because I do not know and it is not mine to promise. But the middle clause is not a promise about outcomes at all. It is a promise about location.

You are accompanied on this bus tonight, and it is not conditional on anybody replying to you. Psalm 91:15 puts God with a person inside the trouble rather than waiting for them on the other side of it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one actually described as being sent to be with us and in us, which is a nearer arrangement than anybody in that group chat could manage.

Look at the order of it too. He shall call upon me, and I will answer. Not: he shall call upon me properly, at the right time, in the right words.

You have been heard today already, including in the four hours when you did not say anything to anybody. The written word says the Spirit intercedes with groanings that cannot be put into words (Romans 8:26), which is a description of exactly what you have been doing since twenty to eleven this morning without knowing it was prayer.

And there is one more thing hiding at the end of that verse. Honor him. That is not a word you use about somebody you are tolerating.

You are not a burden being managed. You are somebody He honors, tonight, in a coat buttoned wrong. Psalm 91:15 says it in writing, and the Spirit of God is called the Spirit of adoption, which is a family word and not a charity word.

This is not about who did or did not text you

Let me take something off you here, because it has been riding quietly with you since about seven this evening.

The people in that group chat are not villains. They did not know. The colleague who walked past your crooked coat four times was thinking about her own week. None of that is coldness, and you do not have to decide tonight whether you are angry with any of them, and it would be perfectly reasonable if you were.

You have not failed at being known, and tonight is not evidence about the kind of person you are. Scripture puts God as the one who sets the solitary in families (Psalm 68:6), which makes the belonging His work rather than your performance, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter because company was always going to be given and never earned.

But here is the thing that has actually been hurting, and I am going to say it plainly so you do not have to.

It is not really that nobody spoke. It is that today happened, an enormous thing happened, and the world did not register it, and a person can start to feel like something that is not quite there.

You are witnessed. Every hour of today was seen, including the part with the paper cup. Scripture calls Him the God who sees, a name given by a woman on her own in a desert with nobody looking for her (Genesis 16:13), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that an experience in a person rather than a doctrine about one.

You were not invisible on that bus stop at ten to eleven, and you were not invisible at seven fifteen this morning either. The psalm says He knows our sitting down and our rising up and is acquainted with all our ways (Psalm 139:2 to 3), and the same Spirit who inspired that line is not squeamish about the ordinary details of a very long day.