Mile Marker Forty One

Dale leaves the gate at ten past six because he has always left the gate at ten past six, and the drive is fifty one minutes if the school buses are running and forty four if they are not.

He knows the road the way a man knows the back of a chair he has sat in for years. Marker twenty two is the one somebody clipped with a mower, bent about thirty degrees toward the ditch and never straightened. Marker thirty is where the honeysuckle came up over the post two summers back and he keeps meaning to say something to somebody about it. Marker forty one has a silo behind it, and a fence line running off at an angle, and it is where the sun catches the mirror if he is running on time.

Eleven years he has driven this. The travel mug has a chip in the rim on the left side and he turns it so the chip faces away. He does not put the radio on. He has not put the radio on since about the fifth year, not because of anything, only because it started to feel like noise laid over the top of something.

There was a stretch when he prayed the whole way out loud. He would start at the gate and go the entire fifty one minutes, out loud, in a normal speaking voice, like a man talking to somebody in the passenger seat. He could tell you which year that stopped. He could not tell you which day.

Now he counts markers. Twenty two, the bent one. Thirty, the honeysuckle. Forty one, the silo. And he is not angry, and he has not gone anywhere, and he still turns in at the same lot and parks in the same row. He simply has not said anything out loud in that truck in a long time.

That is you, maybe, on a road you could drive in your sleep, with your own bent sign and your own chipped mug. Still going. Still parking in the same row. Quiet in a way you never chose and could not put a date on.

The going quiet is not the leaving

I want to say something about the silence in that cab, and I want to be careful about it, because most of what gets said to a person in year eleven is said by somebody who has been on the road eleven days.

The silence is not unbelief. A man who quit would have quit driving. He would have stopped turning in at the lot, stopped parking in the same row, stopped setting the alarm for a quarter to six. Quitting has a shape and this is not that shape. This is a man who has been talking for a long time into a room where the answer has not come, and whose mouth got tired before his legs did.

And I am not going to explain the eleven years to you. I do not know why the road has been this long, and the men who tell you they know are guessing out loud in a place where guessing does harm. I have nothing to sell you about what the waiting is for. I will not tell you it is building anything, and I will not hand you a key somebody dropped and you failed to pick up. There is no such key on that road. There never was.

What I have is what Moses said to a whole nation on the last day of his life, standing in front of people who were going somewhere he was not.

Be strong and of a good courage, fear not, nor be afraid of them: for the LORD thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.Deuteronomy 31:6

Read what the promise is actually about. It is not about the length of the road, and it is not about what waits at the end of it. It is about the passenger seat.

You are being gone with, mile by mile, and that has been true through every one of the quiet years as much as it was in the loud ones. Deuteronomy 31:6 puts it in the present and gives it no conditions, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old line spoken over a desert generation land in a truck cab on a county road. That is not sentiment. That is what the text says and who carries it.

What He does not do, and what He does

He does not forsake. That is the word, and it is worth sitting with, because forsake is not a synonym for fix. Moses did not promise the people a short road or a soft country. He promised them company they could not lose.

So I will not stand here and redefine anything on you. If what you want is your body back, then what you want is your body back, and I am not going to quietly rename His nearness as the answer and then tell you that you already got it. That is a trick, and it is a cruel one, and it has been played on people in year eleven more times than anybody has counted. Nearness is not a consolation for a body. It is a different thing, and it is real, and it does not cancel the ask.

Here is the plain word, both halves in one breath. God heals. He heals bodies, He does it still, He does it through the people caring for you and He does it apart from them. And I do not promise you the outcome, because that is His to decide and it never was mine to hand out, and a page that promises you a specific result is handing you something God did not say. Keep your appointments. Keep taking what you have been given to take. The Lord who goes with you is not competing with anyone who is caring for your body.

You were not left behind at the sixth year when the talking stopped, and you were not put on some other list. It stands written that He does not forsake, and the same Spirit who spoke that line over a nation on their last day with Moses has been riding fifty one minutes a day with a man who has not said a word.

Nobody here lacked faith. Set that sentence down if somebody put it in your hands. It is not in the book, it is not true, and it has done more damage in more parking lots than almost anything else people say to the sick.

And one more thing, and I mean it. If eleven years of this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if the thought has come that everyone would have an easier road without you on it, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. Do not let a page be the only thing in the cab for that. You deserve a person.