Before You Knew There Was A Side

The turn is still there. A mile and a half past the grain elevator, gravel, and a leaning wooden sign for Turner's Landing with the paint gone off the second word.

Wes is doing sixty when he passes it and he does not slow down.

His boy is asleep in the passenger seat with his sneakers up on the dash and a hoodie balled under his ear, and there is a cooler in the back and two hours of road left, and the sign goes by the window in about a second and a half.

Thirty-two years ago Wes was fourteen and he came up that gravel in the back of somebody's pickup.

Third night. Everybody else had gone in. The fire was down to coals and a welder called Roy was sitting on an upturned bucket with a borrowed guitar he could barely play, and he said something plain about Jesus. Wes could not tell you now what it was. He has tried. It was not clever and it was not long and Roy was not a preacher.

What Wes remembers is walking down to the water afterward, on his own, in the dark, with the cold coming up off the lake, and standing there for a while, and then saying, out loud, to nobody visible:

"Okay. You're actually there. I'm Yours."

That is the whole thing. Eight words and a shrug in the middle of them. He said it once and went to bed.

Thirty-two years.

He knows things now. He has read for thirty years, sat under good men, done the study, taken notes in the margins in three different colors of pen. He can lay out four positions on the thing that gets argued about and give you the strongest case for each one, and he can tell you which two he has moved between and why.

Somebody asked him at a table in April what he believes.

He gave them a taxonomy.

He heard himself doing it, the same way you hear yourself in a dream, and he watched them nod, and the conversation moved on to somebody's kitchen renovation, and he sat there with his hand around a glass and thought: I did not answer that.

And now the sign has gone past the window and the boy is asleep and the road is running out ahead of him and Wes is doing sixty and thinking about a fourteen-year-old standing at the edge of black water saying eight words with a shrug in them.

He gets about a mile past the turn.

Then he says it out loud in the cab of the truck. Badly. In a voice he does not recognize. "Okay. You're actually there. I'm Yours."

And his eyes go, and he has to blink hard and keep the truck straight, because his son is asleep two feet away and there is nothing wrong and he could not explain this to anybody.

The path is under the argument, not behind it

I want to be careful with you here, because there is a cheap version of this message and it does real damage.

The cheap version says the boy at the water knew better. He did not. He knew almost nothing. He could not have told you what atonement meant, he would have gotten half the Bible's furniture in the wrong rooms, and every single thing Wes has learned in the thirty-two years since is worth having. Study is not the enemy of what happened at that lake. A man who stops learning about God has decided he has finished with a Person who is infinite, and that is not humility, it is a filing decision.

What the boy had was not better information. It was an unobstructed line to somebody real, and he used it.

Listen to how God says this. It is not a sentimental verse and it was not spoken to sentimental people.

Thus saith the LORD, Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls.Jeremiah 6:16

Read what He actually tells them to do, because it is not what people quote it for.

He does not say go back. He does not say be fourteen again. He says stand still where you actually are, in the middle of the crossroads you are actually standing in, and look, and ask. This is an instruction for a grown man in the middle of a complicated life, holding everything he has learned, standing exactly where the roads meet.

And you are standing in the ways right now. That is not a figure of speech, that is your afternoon, and God's answer to a man standing there is not go back and not push on, it is ask, and see, and walk. His word says it plainly in Jeremiah 6:16, and His Spirit moved a prophet to write it down for somebody who would be doing sixty past a turn-off thirty-two centuries later. The rest for the soul is in the walking, and the path is under your feet already.

Notice the other thing. He says ask for the old paths. Not remember them. Asking is present tense and it is done out loud to a Person. The old path is not your memory of a campfire, and it is a mercy that it is not, because memories go soft and get edited and you would be building your whole faith on a fourteen-year-old's recall of a Friday night.

The path is the Lord Himself, and He has not moved an inch since the water's edge.

So you have not lost anything. What you said at that lake is not a stage you passed through on the way to the shelf of books. It is the foundation the shelf is standing on, and Scripture says the foundation of God stands sure, and His Spirit has been keeping it under you through every year you thought you were only accumulating opinions. That sentence you cannot say out loud any more is not gone. It is buried, which is a different word and a much better one.

Here is what actually happened, and there is no villain in it.

You got briefed. Between fourteen and now, people who loved you and people who did not, books and arguments and one bruising falling out, all of them handed you the map of where everybody stands. And every piece of that briefing was information you needed, and none of it was wrong to receive, and it stacked up on top of the sentence until you could not get at the sentence.

Nobody put the argument there to bury you. It just settles, the way anything settles that gets set down on top of something else for thirty years.

And you are not required to demolish any of it. Hear me on that, because the loud version of this message tells a man to throw the books out, and that is just a second briefing wearing work clothes. You are not being asked to unlearn. You are being asked to go underneath. What is underneath is yours already, the word says the good way is there to be walked and not to be earned, and the same Spirit who met a boy at a lake is standing at your elbow this minute.