I Can Still Drive

Thursday is the busy one. Eleven fifteen, one thirty, and then the long one at three which is usually four before they get out.

Mrs. Okafor first. She has a bag with two handles and she will not let him carry it, and she has a running argument with him about the radio which has been going on for two years and which they both enjoy.

Then the man from number twelve, whose name he still cannot say correctly and who has stopped correcting him and now says it wrong himself when they meet, which is one of the funniest things that has ever happened to either of them.

Then Bernice, who talks the entire way there and says nothing at all on the way back, every single time, and he has learned that the silence is the important half.

He was a fitter. Twenty-six years, and hands that could tell what was wrong with a machine by the sound of it, and a back that gave out in stages over about four years until there was a conversation with a specialist that was not a surprise to anybody.

People thank him for the driving. And every time, without deciding to, he says a version of the same thing: it is nothing, I am going that way anyway.

He is not going that way anyway. There is no anyway. He works his Thursday round the three of them.

The sentence underneath the deflection is not I miss my trade. It is: this is not work, it is what a man does when he has no work.

You know that deflection. Somebody thanks you for the thing you do now and you take the compliment and make it smaller before it can land. Because if you let it be a real thing, you would have to look at what it replaced.

The word in the middle of that sentence

There is a sentence Jesus says in a locked room on the evening of the resurrection, and the whole weight of it sits on one small word.

Then said Jesus to them again, Peace be unto you: as my Father hath sent me, even so send I you.John 20:21

As. Not: in a similar spirit to. Not: in a smaller version of. The comparison is direct, and He puts His own sending and theirs in one sentence, joined.

And look at who is in the room. Men who had run away nine days earlier. Men with nothing to offer, hiding behind a locked door, whose entire professional life had just collapsed publicly. That is the group He says it to.

You are sent in the same sentence as the Son, and the sending has never once been graded against what a man used to do. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man in a car park, and the Holy Spirit who is in you as you sit waiting for Bernice is the evidence that Thursday is not what is left over.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic behind the deflection. If the sending is direct and the room was full of men who had failed, then a back that went in stages is information about twenty-six years of a hard trade. It is not the record of what you are for, and it never had the standing to become that.

What the deflection is actually doing

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that has never been looked at directly.

It is nothing, I am going that way anyway is not modesty. It is protection. As long as the driving is nothing, nobody can ask you how it compares to the fitting, and you never have to sit with the fact that a thing you do now matters and is also much smaller than a thing you did before.

Both of those can be true. That is what nobody tells men in your position. It can matter and it can be smaller, and holding those two at once is not disloyalty to the twenty-six years.

You have been carried through every one of the four years the back was going, and the carrying was never assessed against your trade. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in that car rather than adding up what you can lift.

And nothing here promises the back improves, or that something bigger opens up, or that this is a season on the way to something else. Nobody on this page knows. If Thursdays are the whole of it for the next twenty years, you have not stepped one inch outside the sending.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought in a waiting room car park. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not deflected for two years. And the thing in the way is not the specialist and it is not the trade. It is a sentence: this is what a man does when he has no work. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority sitting outside a clinic. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in what your hands used to be able to do.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than loss, 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.