“You were always welcome.”

No unattached man ever did himself any favors making a detailed allusion to Star Trek, but few ever helped themselves standing firm for John Mayer or Sting either. So this is not new ground for me.

Anyway, my brother and I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. The very last episode of its lauded seven season run had a scene that for some reason has always stuck with me.

We the viewers had gotten to know the senior crew of the Enterprise quite well over the previous seven years’ voyages. We had an unfiltered view of these folks’ perspectives on the moral, romantic, social, and philosophical issues with which they dealt over the years, and grew to care a great deal about them.

The crew had a fairly regular poker game they played, which the show’s creative team used to great effect over the years to explain relationship development, bring simple levity or set up issues to come in future episodes. It was, for the most part, just the senior members of the crew who attended these games, and the great camaraderie these guys enjoyed always shone brightly. One would think that the best memories these guys had, hurtling through cold space with only 1,000 some-odd others onboard, were tied to this poker table.

Yet we never saw Captain Picard attend one of these games.

I don’t recall having ever noticed this until the final episode of the series. This episode dealt a great deal with history, loss, and the tangled relationships that years of accquaintance can produce. (All these stories were told, naturally, through that great sci-fi equalizer known as time travel.) Yet at the very end of the episode, the captain finally does venture ’round to the card game. I don’t recall how the question came up, of why the captain hadn’t played with them before, but I absolutely recall the response of the ship’s doctor (and onetime romantic interest of the captain): “You were always welcome.”

If thirteen years’ memory serves me correctly, that episode and the series ended at that point with a wide, pull-back shot of that group of friends playing poker together, with that scene and that line of dialogue which have stuck with me fully half of my days lived thus far.

“You were always welcome.”

What warms my heart tonight about that memory is this: in my personal life I have to snatch rotten lies from trees all the time, about the things to which I had thought I was not welcome, or invited, allowed to think or expected to be. More than once this past month I’ve had to tell myself something to the effect of, “see, he/she/it wasn’t like that at all.”

Or, “you were always welcome.”

I am convinced that some of the worst trouble humans have with God and with each other is in the lies we never knock down, plenty of which we never even spot.

But when I say “lies,” I don’t just mean those that my friend Lindsay tells me about our kitchen, or my dad saying he was awake for an entire football game. No, the lies of which I am thinking are the self-made ones, like “God is far from you these days,” or “such-and-such person thinks you’re a freak,” or even “God doesn’t care about you or your prayers.”

These are the sorts of lies that you can’t catch, you can’t pre-empt or intercept, unless you know they are there. They aren’t politicians’ lies, or shady employers’ lies, or even those of some witchy woman.

These are the sorts of lies that creep from deep within, from places where scabs reside instead of the scars we’d expect to be fading by now, places that tint our vision with the lenses of idolatry. Places that convince us that a familiar pain is easier to bear than deviation, or risk, or trust. (Or simple faith.)

“You were always welcome.”

I don’t know what Captain Picard’s deal was with not hanging out with his crew, his family, his very best friends. I do know that it meant enough to the writers of the show to have shown us, at the very end of the series (not to mention a rich, complex episode), that the noble captain had at long last settled with the family that adored him and had surrounded him all along.

The people who loved him the most… shot down the lies he never knew he believed.

And I don’t think it hurt at all, because if I remember correctly, that wide shot of the Enterprise that ended the series was of the captain finally playing cards… with those who had mattered to him the most all along.