The Card Behind The Visor

Gus kept a card behind the sun visor for a long time. An index card, folded once the short way, gone furry at the crease from being opened and closed with one hand at stoplights.

There were five things on it. Four in ballpoint and one in pencil, and the pencil one had been written and erased and written again, because it was the only one he ever changed the wording of. He would flip the visor down on the four miles between the house and the elevator and go through it, out loud, the way a man goes through a list.

The November it happened, he was stopped at the light by the grain elevator with the heater making that noise it makes, and he took the card down and got a ballpoint out of the console and drew one line through the pencil entry. Not a scribble. One line, straight, the way a man crosses a thing off a list he means to keep using.

Then he folded the card, put it back up behind the visor, and the light changed.

The brick church at the crossroads is on his way. It is the one he first prayed that pencil line in, at a Wednesday night thing, twelve or thirteen years ago, standing at the second pew from the back because he came in late. He goes past it twice a week. Tuesdays for the co-op and Sundays going the long way to his mother's.

He does not slow down. Not out of bitterness. He would tell you that himself. It is simply that a man does not slow down for a building where he asked for something and stopped asking, and there is no gesture available at forty five miles an hour that means what he would need it to mean.

The card is still up there. He has never taken it down. He just does not read the fifth line anymore, and everything else on it he still says out loud on the four miles to the elevator.

That is you, maybe, with your own crossed out line and your own building you go past at speed.

The line he drew through it

I want to say something about that ballpoint line and I want to get it right, because this is where a page like this usually goes wrong and does damage.

That line was not unbelief. It was mercy. A man had been asking for the same thing for years and every time he asked he had to hope, and every time he hoped and nothing came he had to get up off the floor of it again, and after a while a person cannot keep paying that toll four miles at a time on the way to work. So he took the toll off. He drew a line through the entry so his mouth would stop putting his heart through it every morning.

That is not a spiritual failure. That is a man rationing himself to stay upright, and God has never once looked at a person doing that and called it treachery.

So hear me clearly. I am not here to shame the quiet years. Not the November, not the twelve since, not the forty five miles an hour past the crossroads. Nobody here failed to have enough faith. That sentence is not in the book, it is not true, and it has been said to more people in more parking lots than anybody has counted.

And here is the verse, and I want you to notice what it is actually asking.

And shall not God avenge his own elect, which cry day and night unto him, though he bear long with them?Luke 18:7

You are one of His own, and you were His own through every month you did not mention it once. Luke 18:7 says whose they are before it says anything about how often they cry out, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that order of words matter to a man at a stoplight instead of staying a nice point about grammar.

Though he bear long

That last clause is the one nobody preaches. Though he bear long with them.

The Lord Himself put the long into the story. He did not tell it to a room of people whose answers had come quickly. He told it as a contrast: the judge in that story is the opposite of God, not the picture of Him, and the whole point of the comparison is that if even a man like that eventually acts, then how much more the Father, who is nothing like him.

But He left the long in. He did not pretend it away. There is a bearing long in the text and He said it out loud, and I take a great deal of comfort from the fact that He was not embarrassed to.

What I will not do is explain your long. I do not know why the pencil line went the way it went, and men who tell you they know are guessing out loud in a room where guessing does harm. I have no key you dropped. There was never a key.

Here is the honest word, both halves in the same 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 an outcome, because that is His to decide and it was never mine to hand out, and any page that promises you a result is handing you something God did not say. Keep your appointments. Keep taking what has been given you to take. The God who hears you has never been in a competition with the people caring for your body.

You have a hearing that stayed open the whole time, and you were never taken off the docket in November. It stands written that He does not fail to hear His own, and the same Spirit who moved Luke to write that line down is the one holding the file open on a subject you retired.

And one thing before we go on, because it matters more than the rest of this. If the years have taken you somewhere darker than tired, if the thought has come that the road would be simpler for everybody 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 come sit with you tonight. Not next week. A page cannot do this part and it was never meant to. You deserve a person in the room.