Take Your Foot Off

The field has been chewed up by three hundred cars since ten in the morning and his is the one that finds the soft bit. Not spectacularly. No drama. Just a slow settling down onto the sill on the near side, and the smell of a clutch, and then that particular silence a man makes when he realizes he is not driving out of this.

Within ninety seconds there are six people at the car. A lad with a rope. Somebody's father in a flat cap who has an opinion about which way to face the Land Rover. A woman putting her shoulder against the rear pillar in wellingtons, saying something cheerful about the tea tent. It is a village show. This is a thing that happens.

Somebody raps the window and says the sentence. Keep it in second, don't touch the accelerator, we'll pull you. So he sits with his hands at ten and two, doing precisely nothing, while the whole business is done for him. The car comes up out of the rut in one long unglamorous heave and the world starts moving past the windscreen again, and he lifts a hand out of the window to thank them the way you do.

And then he has to sit in the layby by the gate for a minute, because his eyes have gone, and it is not about the car. It is that he has been sitting still in a rut for three years, keeping it in second and touching nothing, and this is the first time it has ever been done to him in public where he could see it happening.

You have not told anybody how long it has been. You have got very good at the phrase I am fine, and you have stopped starting things, because starting is the part that hurts when it stops. Somewhere back there you decided the sensible thing was to sit still.

What the rut actually costs

Let me stay in the low place for a minute, because it is not the mud that does the damage. The mud is only mud. What does the damage is the second sentence, the one that arrives about a week later: this keeps happening to me, so it must be something about me.

That sentence is a liar and it wears very reasonable clothes. It is not a diagnosis, it is not the plain evidence, and it is not what God is saying. Plenty of people were stopped by an illness, by a firm going under, by somebody else's decision, by a bereavement, by money, by a body that will not do what it used to. None of that is a character reading. And there is no exhortation coming in this piece. Nobody here is about to tell you to get up.

Because look at who is doing the verbs in this verse. It is one line, it is very old, and there is not a single instruction in it.

The LORD upholds all who are falling and raises up all who are bowed down.Psalm 145:14

Upholds. Raises up. Both of them His, both of them present tense, both of them aimed at people who are already down and not managing it. You are held right now by God while you are still in the rut, and that is not encouragement I am supplying, it is what is written, and His Spirit is the one who makes an exhausted man able to believe a line like that about himself.

Who does the lifting, in every single account

Go looking for the man in Scripture who got himself out and you will be a long time finding him. David says God drew him up out of the muddy pit, out of the miry clay, and set his feet on a rock, and every verb in it belongs to God. Peter goes into the water and it is a hand that comes out, not a technique. Paul says plainly that the One who began a good work is the One who carries it through to the end, which would be a very odd thing to write if the carrying were ours.

There is a whole way of reading the Bible that has us as the engine and God as the encouragement, and it has broken more good people than I can count. Turn it back the right way round. You were never the engine. You have been given something that keeps moving when you have stopped, because the purpose in question is God's, and Scripture says no purpose of His can be thwarted, and His Spirit does not require your momentum in order to have any of His own.

Which is why the instruction at the window is the truest thing anybody said all day. Keep it in second. Take your foot off. You are not being asked for one more heave, and the reason is not that you are weak, it is that this particular job was never on your side of the rope. You have a purpose that is not yours to push, and the Holy Spirit is not standing in the field waiting to see whether you can find a bit more.

And hear the other half, because the shame is the real weight here and it is heavier than the car. Being pulled is not a disgrace. Everybody in the whole book of God got where they were going by being carried, and the ones who insisted on managing are not the heroes of it. There is no comeback story being written about you here. There is a God who lifts, and there is you, upright this evening, and one of those two did the work.

One plain thing, said once and then left alone. If sitting still has turned into something heavier, and a voice has started saying that everybody would have an easier time of it without you in the field at all, that is the hour to tell a living person today. Your doctor. A pastor. A friend who will come and sit in your kitchen tonight. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local emergency number or crisis line. Being pulled out by other people is the entire subject of this piece, and that includes this.