Eight Miles In, Counting The Ninety

He does the arithmetic in the truck, most mornings, without meaning to.

It is not a plan and there is nothing written down. It is a running tally of the distance between the man he is and the man he ought to be, and it gets updated every morning at about ten past six on the county road, and the number never gets smaller.

Temper. That is one. Not violence, nothing like that, but a way he has of going quiet and cold that his wife can feel from another room, and that he learned from his own father, and that he has been fighting since he was thirty.

The drinking, which stopped nine years ago and which he does not talk about and which still occupies a room in his head.

The way he is with his oldest boy, which is careful, which is not what he wanted.

Every morning, ten past six, the same three, and the same conclusion, arrived at without words: ninety miles to go.

He is fifty eight.

And here is the thing nobody has ever pointed out to him, and it would probably take a fair amount of persuading, because a man who has been counting the ninety for twenty five years has an enormous amount of practice at it.

He has not once, in that whole time, counted the eight.

He knew thy walking

Moses is talking to a people about to go into the land, and he says a sentence about the forty years behind them that most folks read straight past because it sounds like scenery.

For the Lord thy God hath blessed thee in all the works of thy hand: he knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness.Deuteronomy 2:7

Take that in the truck at ten past six. You are known in your walking and somebody has kept the other number. The word says he knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the legs in all of it.

He knoweth thy walking.

Not He knows where you are going. Not He knows how far is left. He knows your walking, which is the part behind you, the part that was mostly hard and unremarkable and that nobody was writing down.

And notice who is doing the counting in that sentence. Not them. They spent most of forty years complaining about how far they had left to go, and He was the one keeping the record of the miles they had actually walked.

So take this in your truck, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: the road behind you is known and it is counted, right now, by God, whether or not you have ever looked at it. His word says He knoweth thy walking through this great wilderness, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the strength in every one of those miles you have been billing to your own stubbornness.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who taught that a believer goes on, and he was mocked for it in his own century and misread in every one since.

He never meant a man arrives. He meant a man moves, and that the movement is real, and that God is actually doing something in an ordinary life over a long stretch of years.

And the practical instrument he built for that was a room of six people asked out loud, once a week, how it stood with them. Not measured against each other. Not measured against a standard on a wall. Asked, weekly, so that a man could not go twenty five years without ever once noticing what had changed.

Because that is the failure mode. Not backsliding. This. A decent man walking a long way in the dark and keeping only one number.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method existed partly to make a man look back.