Your Story

I’m getting ready at the moment to tell stories for a couple of hours at an event we’re doing in college on Saturday night, which means I get to find all my favourite stories and read them again. And I think this one is my absolute favourite. I know I’m a softy, but I genuinely couldn’t read it at the end through the tears. Because it’s true.

It’s really just a story that Jesus told, reset in the modern world by Phillip Yancey in his book “What’s So Amazing About Grace?” (which, by the way, is crackin’). Anyway, I hope you like it.

A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. One night, after an argument, her Dad knocks on the door of her room and she screams, “I hate you!” That night she acts on a plan she’s rehearsed in her head a hundred times. She runs away.

She’s been to Detroit once before, on a school trip. The newspapers always talk about the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, so she thinks that it’s the last place her parents would look for her. California, maybe, but not Detroit.

On her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right, she decides; her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car teaches her a few things that men like. She’s underage, so they pay a premium. She lives in a penthouse, orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about her folks back home, but their lives seem so boring and provincial now, she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the words “Have you seen this child?” But she’s got blonde hair now, and with the makeup and the piercings she doesn’t look like a child.

After a year the first sallow sings of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street with nothing. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. Although “sleeping” is the wrong word – a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.

One night she’s lying awake, listening for footsteps, and she doesn’t feel like woman of the world anymore. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She whimpers, softly. She’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s pulled on top of her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three times it rings through to the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and in that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if here parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? Even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them time to overcome the shock.

The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a huge banner that reads “Welcome home!”

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know…”

He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. There’s a banquet waiting for you at home.”

I don’t really know what to say at the end here except that I’ve never run away from my literal home, but I cry when I read this because this really is my story. And I tell it because I believe it could be your story too.