Hazard Lights On The Hard Shoulder

The chairs are the funny part. Forty-one folding chairs, stacked and strapped, and he counted them twice this morning the way his father used to, and now they are sitting perfectly still in the back of a van that has stopped making any noise at all.

He is on the hard shoulder with the hazard lights going and a phone with eleven percent on it, and the trucks are doing what trucks do, and every time one goes past the whole van rocks a little and the chairs shift against the straps.

An hour. That is the gap. Forty-one chairs, an hour of road, and a hall booked since March.

He has run this gathering every year since his father died. Nine of them now. It was his father's thing, the whole neighborhood in one room once a year, and when the old man went there was a silence at the funeral where somebody was supposed to say so who does it now, and nobody said it, and he heard himself say it anyway.

Nine years. He has never once asked anybody for help with the chairs, because asking would have meant admitting it had become heavy, and it had become heavy in about year three.

So he sits with his hands still on the wheel of a van that is not going anywhere, and the sentence arrives with the fourth truck. Not the engine has gone. The sentence is: if I do not get there, it does not happen, and that is what I have been for.

You have had that sentence in a different vehicle. Maybe you are the one who holds the family together, or keeps the group running, or is the only person who remembers everybody's birthday. Somewhere along the line the thing became yours to carry, and tonight, or some night, the carrying stopped working, and what came up was not inconvenience. It was something much closer to identity.

The van stopped. Something else did not.

Let me set two things apart on that hard shoulder, because they have been one object in your chest for nine years and neither of us can move until they separate.

The van stopped. That is true and it is not a metaphor. Forty-one chairs are going to be forty-one chairs in a van tonight, and the hall is booked, and somebody is going to have to ring somebody, and that is a genuine loss and not a lesson.

The purpose of God did not stop, and it was never the same object as the gathering. That is the whole of what I have to say to you and I am not saving it for the end of the road. What cannot be stopped is His purpose. Not your reliability, not your van, not the nine years, not your father's name.

The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.Psalm 138:8

Read the shape of that sentence, because the shape is the whole gift. David does not say I will perfect what concerns me. He says the Lord does, and then, in the same breath, he asks God not to forsake the work of His own hands. That is a man handing back a thing he had been holding, and noticing on the way that it was never his work in the first place. It was always the work of God's hands, and David was inside it.

You are inside a work that belongs to the hands of God tonight, on a hard shoulder with your hazards going, and it did not stall when the van did. That is what the written word says over you and not a kind thing I invented for a bad evening, and the Holy Spirit who has been at work through all nine of those gatherings is the evidence that none of it ever ran on your engine.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic. If the thing that keeps moving is His, then a dead van is information about a van. It is not information about a son, and it never had the standing to become that.

Your father did not leave you the weight

Here is the second thing, and it takes something off you rather than adding it.

At that funeral you picked up more than a gathering. You picked up the idea that the whole of what your father was is now stored in you, and that if you drop it, it is gone. Nine years of chairs have been nine years of proving it is not gone. That is why an hour on a hard shoulder feels like a bereavement rather than a breakdown.

You have been carried through all nine of those years, and the carrying was never a reward for getting the chairs there. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that working through your family rather than watching to see whether you make it by seven.

And there is something worth saying flat out, because this is precisely where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to fix the van and get there. Nothing here is telling you to run it again next year. If that gathering never happens again you have not stepped one inch outside the purpose of God, and neither has your father, because getting inside it was never something either of you achieved by organizing anything.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm idea on a cold road. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not held behind the teeth for nine years. And the thing in the way is not the engine, and it is not the hall, and it is certainly not the family. It is a sentence: that is what I have been for. That sentence has been running the whole of your adult life without anybody once answering it out loud.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with authority sitting in a dead van. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself you put behind them.

If this evening has taken you somewhere darker than frustration, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.