Eleven Months And A Tuesday In March

The screen door on Walt's kitchen has a spring that lost its temper in about 1994, and it does not close, it detonates. Everybody who has ever come up those steps knows to catch it.

He caught it at four fifty this morning coming back in from the yard, and he stood there holding it with two fingers, easing it shut in the dark like a man defusing something, and he thought: well, that is the most careful thing I have done in twelve hours.

Eleven months.

He is sixty-eight. He has been at this, on and off, since he was nineteen, and he wants you to understand what eleven months is at sixty-eight. It is not a milestone. It is the longest unbroken stretch of his entire adult life, and he had not told a soul, because at his age you stop making announcements. He had a way of marking it that nobody would notice: he had started keeping the good coffee in the cupboard again.

There is a bag of it up there right now that he bought in February.

Monday was nothing. That is what he keeps circling. It was not a funeral, it was not bad news, it was not a fight. It was a Monday in March with a long light evening and a job he had put off, and somewhere between five and seven the whole thing simply came apart with no more ceremony than a screen door.

Now it is four fifty on Tuesday and he is standing in his own kitchen doing the arithmetic that an old man does, which is a different arithmetic from a young man's. A young man asks how long it will take to get it back. An old man asks whether there is enough road left to bother.

Eleven months at sixty-eight and it went in one evening. What exactly do I think I am building here.

And that is where I quit talking about Walt, because you have your own bag of good coffee in the cupboard, and you have already started pricing the road.

I will tell you what I know about that arithmetic. It looks like humility and it is not. It is a ledger, and the man holding the pen is not on your side.

Rising is what you do, not what you achieve

Let me put the load down first, because it is heavy and it is not yours to carry.

You are not too old for this and you are not too far along and the years behind you are not a reason to stay sitting down. You are a man or a woman who is going to get up this morning, and that is not a hope I am handing you, it is a description of what people in Christ do.

Here is where I get that. Not from stubbornness and not from a poster. It is written down, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it across a dark kitchen at four fifty:

For a just man falls seven times, and rises up again.Proverbs 24:16

Sit with that a minute, because it is odd on purpose. It does not say a just man does not fall. It says he falls, and the number is not small, and the thing that identifies him is not the ground, it is the getting up. The rising is not the reward for the record. The rising is the description of the man.

So you are not disqualified at four fifty in the morning. You are a person Scripture describes as one who rises, and the Spirit of God is not standing in your yard with a clipboard revising that.

Nobody is charging you for the eleven months

Now the ledger, because it is the thing doing the damage, and I have watched it do this to good men for forty years.

You are sitting there being told the eleven months were spent. Wasted. Paid out for nothing, like money in a bad field. And at sixty-eight that lands harder than it does at thirty, because the field is smaller.

That is not how any of this works. Those eleven months were not currency. They were days you lived, and God saw every one of them, and not one of them has been withdrawn from the account He keeps. There is no repayment schedule and no interest owing, because the whole debt was settled at the cross and God does not bill twice for the same thing. That is written, and His Spirit is the one who makes it a comfort instead of a doctrine.

I will say the plain part too, the way a neighbor would. Keep every bit of real help you have got. The meeting on Thursday nights, the doctor, the medicine, the fellow who calls you on Sunday whether you answer or not. None of that is competing with God and none of it is weak faith. It is His kindness with a face and a phone number on it, and He never asked a man to choose between His hand and the hands He sent.