The Boys Who Rode in My Truck

He drove the same run for thirty years, out at five ten, back by four, and for about twenty six of those years there was somebody in the passenger seat.

It started because a neighbor's boy needed dropping at the yard and it was on the way, and then it was that boy's cousin, and after a while it was simply a thing: if you were sixteen and had nothing much and somebody's father knew him, you rode along for a summer and you learned to load a truck and you got told to sit up.

He never made a project of it. He would be embarrassed by any word you used for it. He had a rule, which was that he did not ask questions before the second week, and he had another rule, which was that he did not tell anybody's mother anything, and those two rules are the whole of what he would call his method if you cornered him.

He is seventy now. The truck is a different truck and the run is not his any more.

And the seat is empty.

He sat in it this evening at a pull off on the road, which he does sometimes, and looked at the seat, and did the thing he has been doing more since he stopped driving, which is going through the list. Not a written list. He can do about eleven of them by name.

And he does not know what happened to one of them.

That is not quite true. He knows one of them got married because he saw it in the paper. He knows one of them died, in two thousand and four, and that one he does not go past.

The rest is nothing. Twenty six years of summers and a hundred hours a boy with somebody who did not ask questions until the second week, and there is no report on any of it, and he has stopped assuming it took.

That last part happened slowly and he could not tell you when. He used to think about them and feel warm. Now he thinks about them and feels a sort of careful nothing, which is what a man puts in place when he has decided not to hope about something.

The light down that road in the evening comes along the shoulder and gets under the trees, and he is parked in a pull off with an empty seat, seventy years old.

You have that seat. It might be a classroom, a team, a shift you supervised, twenty years of somebody's children in and out of your kitchen. And you have gone quietly from warm to careful. There is a passage in Hebrews about people who never got the report either, and what it says about them is not what anybody expects.

They saw them afar off and greeted them

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that sends a seventy year old man looking. Look them up. Somebody will know. Get in touch and find out. I am not going to say it, and not because there is anything wrong with a phone call, but because a man in a careful nothing will make that call to get an answer about himself, and the answer is not in the possession of a forty five year old man in another state.

Hebrews 11 runs through a long list of people who lived by faith and then stops and says this about all of them: These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth (Hebrews 11:13).

Not having received. That is the plain statement in the middle of the greatest roll call of faith in Scripture. They did not get it. And then three verbs, and they are the ones worth sitting with: they saw them afar off, they were persuaded of them, and they embraced them.

You can embrace a thing at a distance. That is what the verse says people of faith actually did. They greeted a thing they were never handed, and Scripture calls that faith rather than consolation.

You have been looking at something real from a long way off, and the distance did not make it less real. That is not a soft reading; Hebrews 11:13 grants the not receiving and then commends the seeing and the greeting, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that verse put both halves in one sentence.

And notice the last phrase, because it is the one that reframes an empty passenger seat. They confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims. A man passing through does not get to see how the country turns out. That is not a failure of the man. It is the shape of a life that is going somewhere.

These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them.Hebrews 11:13

Careful nothing is a decision

Now the thing that has actually been happening, slowly, since he stopped driving.

He did not lose hope in those boys. He put it away, which is a different action and a deliberate one, and men do it when hoping has started to cost more than it returns. Careful nothing is cheaper than warmth and it works, and the price of it is that a man of seventy sits in a pull off and feels almost nothing about twenty six years of the best thing he ever did.

You have never had to protect yourself from your own thirty years. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and the love you have showed toward His name, and the not forgetting is His and it is unconditional; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has kept every summer whether or not anybody wrote.

This is yours right now, in a pull off with the door open: a record you are allowed to be warm about again. Malachi 3:16 says a book of remembrance was written before Him, and the writing is finished and the reading is His; the Spirit who inspired that line has been holding eleven names you can still say and a great many you cannot.

Fruit goes where you are not

Here is the piece that a man who has driven a route will understand better than most.

You take somebody somewhere and then they get out. That is the entire job. Nobody stands at a drop off feeling that the journey failed because the passenger walked away, and yet that is precisely the arithmetic a man does about his own life at seventy.

John 15:5 says the branch that abides bears much fruit and it never once says the branch is shown it. Fruit grows outward. It leaves in the direction of the person it grew for. A branch that could inspect its own harvest would be a branch whose fruit never went anywhere.

You were bearing fruit that got out of the truck, which is what fruit does. John 15:5 puts the bearing on the branch and the seeing nowhere at all; the Holy Spirit did the growing and He carried it up a driveway and into a house you have never been in.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the drive you already take, tell Him about one summer with nothing asked for. Not a request for news about anybody. One summer, one boy, the radio, the load. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody grades that.