He is twenty-six years old. He has been here for three years. He will, in all likelihood, be here for the rest of his life.
Not because he has given up. Not because he has stopped trying. But because the condition he carries, the fragility of his mind, the particular way his brain is wired, the accumulated weight of what happened to him before he arrived. It means that the world outside these walls is not currently safe for him. May never be.
He knows this. On some days he holds it quietly. On other days it breaks the surface and he asks the question that nobody in the building knows how to answer properly.
I want to sit with that question honestly, because I think it deserves better than the answers it usually gets.
The first answer it usually gets is the optimistic one. You never know what God can do. Miracles happen. Don't give up. This answer is not wrong exactly. But for the young man who has heard it many times and is still here, it has begun to feel less like hope and more like a postponement of the conversation he actually needs to have. It keeps the real question at arm's length. It makes hope contingent on a change of circumstances that may not come.
The second answer it usually gets is the practical one. You have a safe place to sleep. You are cared for. Many people have it worse. This answer is also not wrong. But it does not answer the question. It answers a different question. The question of whether his basic needs are met. The young man is not asking about his basic needs. He is asking about his life. About whether it means something. About whether there is anything ahead of him worth walking toward.
Both answers, in their different ways, avoid the weight of what he is actually carrying.
The New Testament has a passage that gets quoted often in contexts like this. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a future and a hope. It is written on mugs and posters and the inside covers of Bibles. It is said at funerals and bedsides and in hospital waiting rooms.
What is less often noted is the context in which it was written. It was written to a people in exile. Not to people on their way somewhere better. To people who had been told that the exile would last seventy years. That most of them would not live to see the end of it. That they should build houses and plant gardens and raise children in the place of their captivity, because this was going to be their life for a very long time.
The hope God offers is not a promise of extraction from the difficult place. It is a promise of presence within it. A future that is measured not by the changing of circumstances but by the continuing of a life.
It is a real life, with meaning, love and the presence of God, all inside the place that has been given.
What does this mean for the young man in his twenties who may never leave?
It means that his life is not on hold. It is not a waiting room for the real life that will begin when things improve. This is his life. These walls, these people, these mornings and evenings and meals and conversations. This is the fabric of his existence, and it is not less real or less valuable because it does not look like the life he imagined.
It means that hope, for him, is not primarily about the future changing. It is about finding, slowly, imperfectly, and with help, that the present is habitable. That there are small things worth noticing. That the person sitting across from him at breakfast is worth knowing. That the God who is described in the New Testament as making his home among the broken and the poor is not absent from this building.
It means that the question what is my future has an answer, but it is not the answer he was expecting. The answer is not a changed horizon. It is a companion for the road. It is the slow discovery that the life you have been given, however far from what you hoped, is still a life in which you are known and loved and accompanied.
This is not a small hope. In some ways it is the largest hope the Christian faith knows how to offer. This is the hope of presence. The promise that that you are not alone in it.
The young man is twenty-six. He may be here at sixty-six. And if he is, if the walls do not change and the horizon stays the same, the question is not whether God has forgotten him. The question is whether he can learn, slowly and with help, to find God here. In this building. In this life. In this particular and unrepeatable existence that has been given to him.
I believe he can.
And on the days when he cannot feel it — on the days when the question surfaces again and the walls feel like nothing but walls — I want him to know that the asking is allowed. That the grief is real. That God is not waiting for him to arrive at peace before drawing near.
He is near already. He has been near the whole time.
The road is long. You are not walking it alone.
