Ask Him On The Lane Home

Ten past six in the yard and none of the vans have moved. The rain came in about two and stopped about five, and every man standing on this concrete knows what that does to the outdoor rows before Bryn opens his mouth.

Bryn comes out with his phone and reads the names for the tunnels. He reads them the way a man reads a list he does not enjoy, quick and level, no eye contact until the end of it.

Six names. His is not one of them. There is no arguing with a wet field, so he says right, and Bryn says sorry mate, Thursday, and puts the phone in his pocket, and that is the whole conversation.

He walks back down the lane. Hedge on one side, the tunnels going white in the light on the other. It has turned into a beautiful morning, which is its own particular joke.

Ryan's van comes up behind him and Ryan lifts two fingers off the wheel, and he lifts a hand back. Ryan is on the packhouse now. Indoors, on the belt, the same hours in a downpour as in a heatwave. They started the same week, three years back. Ryan got asked in a car park by a man who needed somebody that afternoon.

He is glad for Ryan. He is. He would say so to anybody and mean every word of it.

And underneath the glad there is something that has walked down this lane beside him every wet morning for three years, and it has never once been said out loud, to anybody, and least of all to God.

You know the one. You have your own lane.

Nobody in the book was sent away for asking this

The question always has the same shape. Why him. Why not me. What is the actual difference between us, because I have looked and I cannot find one.

You are allowed to ask that. Not allowed as in tolerated, allowed as in it is written down in the book you believe, in the mouth of a man God had chosen and did not unchoose, and the same Spirit who carried that sentence into Scripture is the one walking this lane with you now.

Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?Jeremiah 12:1

Look at the order he does it in. He says God is righteous. Then he says, and I want to talk to You about this. He does not tidy the question first so it comes out sounding devout, and he does not pretend the thing he has been watching is not what it is. He puts it straight into the face of the one it is about, and the Holy Spirit saw fit to keep it on the page so that no believer walking home from a locked gate in any century would think he was the first one to think it.

So take this standing where you are. You are not in trouble for that question. It is not evidence against you and it is not a crack in your faith. It is a man talking to God about something that matters, which is the oldest work our people do, and the written word keeps the record of it because the Spirit meant you to find it there.

A question is spoken. A case is built.

I have spent my life around things that get put up and things that come down, and here is the difference between the two.

A question is a spoken thing. It goes out of your mouth, it lands somewhere, and either way it is out of your hands and in the open. A case is a built thing. It goes up quietly, course by course, and it is never inspected, because you never show it to anybody.

Every wet morning lays another course. The list read out on the concrete. The van going past. Thursday, mate. None of those, on its own, is a verdict on God. Stacked in the dark for three years without one word spoken over them, they start to look like a wall, and a man can end up living behind his own wall and calling it realism.

Hear me plainly, because this is the whole reason I am writing to you. You have not gone bitter and you are not a cynic. You have been building in the dark because nobody ever told you the door was open. Scripture says pour out your heart before him in Psalm 62:8, and the Spirit of God who put that line in the book is not standing at the door of that room deciding whether your version is fit to bring in.

The case is not sin. The case is unspoken, and unspoken is the only condition it needs in order to keep growing. Say it, and it goes back to being a question. A question can be carried. A wall has to be lived behind.

His goodness is not a ration

There is a second thing underneath that one and it is quieter, and naming it takes most of its weight off you.

It is the fear that there was a fixed amount. That what Ryan got came out of a bin with only so much in it, and every time somebody else gets lifted the level drops for you. Nobody says that out loud. Nearly everybody in your position has thought it.

Jesus told a story about men standing about in a marketplace all day, and one detail in it should be read slowly by anyone who has ever stood in a yard at ten past six.

And about the eleventh hour he went out, and found others standing idle, and saith unto them, Why stand ye here all the day idle? They say unto him, Because no man hath hired us.Matthew 20:6 and 7

That is the plainest sentence in the New Testament about a man in your trade. No man hath hired us. Not we were lazy, not we did not want it, not we had something to answer for. And the householder does not lecture them about it. He keeps going back out, hour after hour, to the exact place where the unhired stand.

I am not telling you a van is coming. I do not know that, and no honest page would say it. I am telling you where His eyes are, which is a different thing entirely, and it is the thing that is yours today. You are not overlooked in that market, and you have never once been the leftover in a story God is telling about somebody else, because the written word puts Him out at the eleventh hour looking straight at the ones nobody picked, and His Spirit is the one who kept that hour in the book for you to read this morning.

What He has given Ryan has not been lifted out of your hands. God is not running a ration and He is not running a queue, and what He is doing about the money is His own business, however He answers and whenever, and nothing on this page pretends to know it.