They Pray And I Fix The Truck

Twenty past eight on a Saturday and there is a hood up in the yard, which is more or less the permanent condition of that yard.

The old church truck, which is nineteen years old and which two separate people have described as a ministry in itself. A wrench being handed across by a nine year old who has appointed herself. Coffee on the fender. Two other men doing the thing men do around an engine, which is offering opinions from a distance and being entirely welcome.

He has his head in there and he already knows what it is, and he has known for about four minutes, and he is letting the conversation run because the conversation is half of what they came for.

Thirty years he has been the one they call.

Trucks, roofs, a boiler once at eleven at night in February. There is not a family in that church who has not had him in their driveway or their basement. He has driven ninety miles to get somebody home. He has fixed the same widow's back door three times because he will not let her pay for a proper one and she will not accept a gift.

Nobody in that county would say a word against him.

And on a Wednesday night, when they get to the end of the meeting and somebody who is struggling asks for prayer, and two of the men go over and put a hand on that person's shoulder and say what they say, he stacks the chairs.

He has wanted to be one of those two men since he was twenty-six.

He has never said that out loud. Not to his wife of thirty-one years, not to either of the two men, not to God, not really, not in words. Because what would it sound like. A man who is needed constantly, who is thanked constantly, saying that what he actually wanted was the other job.

What this is not

Let me say it flat out before anything else, because you can hear a sales pitch coming from a mile off.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is nothing arriving at the end that explains what God gave you in place of it and expects you to be satisfied. That would be a page telling a man what he is, and this site does not do that.

And it is not going to tell you the other thing is coming. I do not know that. Nobody does, and a man of fifty-four does not need somebody making promises on God's behalf that God did not make.

You are not being managed through anything here, and there is no trade being set up. That is not me being careful with you. Scripture handles this in one line in a psalm, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man to be content with a substitute before He would talk to him.

One line, and it settles the ownership

Here is the sentence, and it is short and most people sing it without hearing it.

Know ye that the LORD he is God: it is he that hath made us, and not we ourselves.Psalm 100:3

Not we ourselves.

That is the whole freight of it and it is doing something you would not expect, because it sounds at first like a line about humility and it is actually a line about relief.

If He made you and you did not, then how you came out is not a project you have been failing at. It is not a set of choices you got wrong at twenty-six. It is not an outcome you could have adjusted with more effort or more prayer or a different decade.

You have spent thirty years, without ever naming it, quietly holding yourself responsible for having come out the wrong shape.

You are not the one who made you, and you were never going to be, and the psalm says that as a plain fact rather than as a consolation. I am not stretching that. Psalm 100:3 puts the making entirely outside the person being made, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man with his head under a hood.

What thirty years of not saying it costs

Now the part that matters most, and it is not about the truck.

There is a specific thing that happens to a man who is needed constantly. Everybody assumes he is fine, because he is capable, and capable men do not generate concern. So nobody has ever asked him what he wanted, because it did not occur to anybody that a man who is that useful might want something else.

And after enough years of nobody asking, a man stops having the sentence at all. Not stops feeling it. Stops having it in words.

Which is why it has never been said to God either. You cannot hand over a thing you have never put into a sentence.

You have not been ungrateful for thirty years, you have been carrying something so long unworded that it stopped being available to say. The word treats a person's making as God's own doing rather than as the person's problem to justify, and the Spirit who searches all things has been under that hood with you and has known the sentence even in the years you did not have it.

Handing it over is not giving it up

So here is the action, and I want to be exact about it, because the wrong version of this gets preached and it is cruel.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it. That is false and it will not hold.

It is not deciding it will never happen. Neither of us knows that and I am not going to pretend to.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, in your own words, in a yard, and putting it into His hands rather than carrying it in a place where it has no words. That is all. What He does with it after that is His business.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture never once asks a man to stop wanting something as the price of handing it over. The psalm puts the making on His side and leaves the man free, and the Spirit who helps our infirmities is not waiting for you to feel different first.