Passed Over

Forty years of sitting in rooms where other people tell theirs.

He is not bitter and he does not disbelieve them. His uncle had a thing happen on a road in the sixties that changed the whole family and there is not one person alive who thinks that man invented it. A woman in that community was told something in a dream about her son and it was correct, in detail, and everybody knows.

He has had nothing.

Forty years. Faithful, present, at everything, the one who drives people, the one who is asked to say something at the difficult funerals because he can be trusted not to make it about himself.

Nothing has ever happened to him that he could stand up and tell.

In the spring, at a gathering, at the end of a long afternoon, a young man told one, and it was good and it was real and everybody was glad.

And he noticed, sitting at the back with a plate on his knee, that he was doing something with his face. Holding it. Arranging it into gladness rather than being glad.

He went home and sat in the truck outside his own house for a while, which he never does, and the sentence that came up was: I have been keeping score.

Not against the young man. Not against anybody in particular. Just a running tally, forty years long, of who has been given something and who has not, and he is the only entry on his side of it.

The secret things belong to Him, and the revealed things belong to you

Sit down under that canopy a minute, because there is a verse in Deuteronomy that divides everything in existence into two parts and hands you one of them.

The secret things belong unto the Lord our God: but those things which are revealed belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law.Deuteronomy 29:29

Two categories, and nothing sits outside them.

The secret things belong to Him. That is where the road in the sixties lives, and the dream about the son, and every reason why one man is shown something and another man is not. It is His, it is not published, and no amount of faithfulness entitles anybody to a copy.

And then: those things which are revealed belong unto us.

Belong. It is a word about property. The revealed things are yours, and they are yours for ever, and the verse says what they are for: that we may do them.

Hear this with a plate on your knee. You have not been passed over, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the distribution of the unusual entirely in the secret column and hands you the revealed column outright, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you at every funeral for forty years.

Now let me name the score, because you named it in a truck and that is more than most men manage in a lifetime.

A score requires a currency, and yours is accounts. Things that can be told. And once that is the currency, forty years of driving people and standing up at hard funerals and being trusted converts to nothing, because none of it is tellable in that form.

You have been running a ledger in a currency your own life does not produce, and you have been losing it every year since you were about twenty five.

Hear this too, and let it out of the truck. You are not further from Him than the young man, and Scripture is what says so. What is written keeps the reasons in the secret column where nobody may read them, and the Spirit of God does not distribute the unusual as a wage, and no verse anywhere makes an account of something the measure of a life.

And let me be plain, because this category can be handled badly and this site will not do it. Nothing here is a word against your uncle or that woman or the young man in the spring. What happened to them happened. Nobody is explaining it away and nobody is diminishing it, and the gladness you were arranging on your face is the right response and you were right to want it.

The only thing being taken out is the tally.