The Asymptote

He did not get out of the car.

He drove to the cemetery. He found the parking lot. He sat there for forty-five minutes with the engine off and the windows down and the Florida heat doing what it does, and he did not get out of the car. His father's stone is a hundred yards away. He has not been to it since the burial, three years ago, when he stood at the edge of the group in the way that people stand at the edge of groups when they do not feel entitled to be at the center.

He and his father did not end well. There is no short version of why. The long version involves decades of distance and two or three moments when something could have been repaired and wasn't, and then a phone call from his sister that came too late, and then a hospital room where his father was already past the point of conversation. He has said what he needed to say to an empty room and a closed door and a stone he cannot make himself stand in front of.

The question he is carrying is not the same as the widow's question from the last chapter. He is not asking where his father is. He is asking something harder. He is asking whether he is the kind of person who gets to stand anywhere near where God is. He is asking, in the formulation that has become habitual over three years, whether a person like him — who let things go unfixed that could have been fixed, who chose distance when proximity was available, who stood at the edge of a burial and felt like a stranger at his own father's grave — whether that person gets to hold onto the things this book has been saying about eternal life and relational knowing and the presence of the living God.

That question is the question this chapter is for.