I Turn The Radio Up

Ten past three, and he is third on the rank outside the station with the engine off and the window down an inch.

There is a knock in the front nearside. It started in the summer as something he could tell himself was the road surface, and by October it had a name, and the name has a price on it, and the price is not there. It is worse on left turns. He has started taking the long way round some jobs so it turns right, and he knows exactly how that sounds.

When it is bad, he turns the radio up. Not consciously, not as a plan. His hand goes out and the volume goes up and the knock goes under the music, and he drives on.

The last fare was a decent lad coming back off a late flight, full of the fortnight he had just had, telling him about the sea there and how cheap the food was and how they are going again in the spring.

And he said all the right things. Sounds lovely. Good for you, mate. Mind how you go.

Then he pulled off the rank and sat at the lights and heard what was actually in him, and it was not a nice sentence, and it was aimed at nobody the lad had ever met. It was aimed higher up.

He turned the radio on before it finished.

That is the bit he has told nobody, and it is not the money. It is that he used to be a soft man, and something in him has been going hard for about two years, and at three in the morning on a wet rank he does not much like the person he can hear in there.

If any of that is familiar, stay with me. I am not here to tell you off.

The noise we turn the radio up on

Let me name the wound before I lift anything off it, because that is how it is done properly.

The knock is not the wound. The wound is what a long stretch of shortfall does to the inside of a man. It puts an edge on him that his own kids notice. It makes a stranger's fortnight in the sun land in him like a slap, and then it hands him a second thing straight after, which is the shame of having felt that.

And what he does with the whole business is what he does with the knock: he turns something up over the top of it. Work. The radio. Being cheerful in the mirror. Anything at all that means the sentence does not have to be finished.

So hear this before we go one line further, because it is the thing you came for. You are not in trouble. God is not offended by how hard this has made you, and there is no mark being kept against you for it, because His word says He knows what we are made of and remembers we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and the Holy Spirit is in you as a comforter and not as a monitor.

I mean that plainly and I am not going to soften it later on. Nobody here is going to call your bitterness a sin, ask you to repent of it before you get any kindness, or explain to you that a better Christian would have handled two years of this more gracefully. That is not what is happening on this page.

The book kept the bitter man's words

Here is something the tidy version of this faith never mentions.

Therefore I will not restrain my mouth; I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul.Job 7:11

That is in Scripture. Not as a warning, not as an example of what went wrong: it is simply there, in the record, a man announcing that he is going to say the bitter thing in full and not hold it in.

And here is the part that ought to change the temperature in your car. At the end of the book, God turns to the men who had been correcting him, the ones with the tidy explanations about why he was in it, and He tells them they have not spoken rightly about Him, as His servant Job has (Job 42:7).

Read that twice. The bitter man was the one who spoke rightly. The men who were embarrassed by him and kept improving his theology were the ones who got it wrong.

You are safe with God with the whole sentence. Not the softened version, not the one with the religious sanding down the edges: the actual one, in the words you think it in on the rank at three in the morning. The written word keeps a whole book of a man doing exactly that, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that book in your hands tonight rather than a leaflet about attitude.

Softening is not a job you do to yourself

Now, you probably want the hardness gone. Most people in it do, and that wanting is not a small thing, it is the softness underneath making itself heard.

But hear how it works, because getting this backwards is what keeps a man stuck for years.

A bruised reed he will not break, and a faintly burning wick he will not quench.Isaiah 42:3

That is God's manner with people in your condition, written down long before you got in the car. He does not stamp on what is nearly out. And when Scripture talks about a hard heart being made soft, it is never a project handed to the person: it is God saying He will take the stone out Himself and put flesh in its place (Ezekiel 36:26). The softening is His work, and the timetable is His, and nothing in it starts with you apologizing for how you got here.

Where I grew up, frost came out of a field from underneath. You did not go and do anything to it. The ground warmed under it and one morning the field was soft again, and if you had stood on it in February shouting, all you would have done was compact it.

You have the same warming going on under you right now, and it is not something you have to generate. The Holy Spirit is the one doing it, He has been doing it for a while, and Romans 5:5 says His love has already been poured into your heart, which is to say the softening started somewhere you cannot see and it did not wait for you to be nicer about it.