The Sunday the Bridge Was Out

Russ Kettleman has left his house at seven fifteen on a Sunday morning for thirty-one years.

Fifty minutes, county line to Bethel Chapel, past the grain elevator and the four-way at Muncy Road, and he could drive it with his eyes half shut and some mornings very nearly does. His mother taught him that road before she taught him to drive it. She sat him third pew from the back on the left, and that is where he still sits, and there is a worn place on the wood where his hand has rested through eleven hundred sermons.

His mother is at Cedar Ridge now. Her memory went the slow way, one room at a time. For a long while the first thing she said when he came through her door on a Sunday afternoon was, "Were you in church this morning?" He would say yes, and she would settle back into the chair like a woman who had gotten a good report on a Friday.

She has not asked in six years.

He still goes. He could not tell you why in a way that would satisfy anybody, including himself. He tells people it is habit. In the quiet part of his own head he calls it something he does for her, the way he keeps her azaleas cut back at the old place where nobody lives now. And underneath that thought is the one he has never said out loud to a living soul: if she had not put him in that pew, he does not know whether he would believe a word of it.

Then in March the bridge over Sand Creek went out.

The water took the south abutment on a Thursday night, and by Sunday there were barricades and a detour sign pointing the wrong direction entirely. Russ sat at the barricade with the truck idling and the wipers going. Fifty minutes had become an hour and forty the long way around, and it was already ten past eight.

So he drove twenty-five minutes the other way, into Pell, and parked on the gravel beside a white church with a sign he had passed a thousand times and never once read.

Nobody in that building knew his mother's name.

He sat in the back and sang out of a book he did not need, and afterward a man of about seventy in a cardigan handed him coffee in the fellowship room and asked him, the way a man asks about the weather:

"What is it you believe, friend?"

And Russ heard his own voice come from somewhere outside himself and say, "I believe Jesus Christ died for me and got up out of that grave, and I belong to Him. I have believed that since I was nine years old."

Since I was nine years old.

He had not known that was in there. He had not known there was a date on it.

He got out to the truck and sat with the keys in his hand and did not start it for a good while. And a man in a cardigan went home, washed a coffee cup, and never found out what he had done.

Not of yourselves

Paul says one thing about faith that most of us have never once let ourselves hear all the way through.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God:Ephesians 2:8

Not of yourselves. Sit in that a second.

He is not saying your faith is small. He is saying it did not come up out of you in the first place, and it did not come up out of anybody else either, which means the long question of whether you manufactured it was never worth losing six years to.

It is a gift. And a gift has exactly two ends. Someone gave it. Someone received it. Paul puts no middle in that sentence at all: no row of chairs, no woman who took you, no fifty minutes of road. Those things are precious and I will not say one word against them. They are simply not the source, and they never once claimed to be.

You are not the custodian of somebody else's faith. You are the one it was handed to, by name, and the handing over already happened. That is not my warm opinion about your Sunday morning. The written word says it is the gift of God, and the Holy Spirit who carried that sentence into Paul's hand is the same Spirit carrying it into a parked truck on a wet March morning.

Here is where the whole thing turns, and it is not a big word.

A custodian keeps a thing in good order for somebody else. An owner uses it. The custodian polishes the piano and keeps the lid down. The owner plays something badly on a Tuesday because he wanted to hear it.

So you polish.

And hear me carefully, because this is exactly where a man in your position gets hurt by a well meant sermon. The polishing was not hypocrisy. Thirty-one years of getting up and going for a woman who cannot ask any more is not a fraud, it is loyalty, and loyalty is one of the last honest things left in a person. Nobody here is going to tell you that you have been faking. Nobody here is handing you a bill for the years.

You have not been pretending your way through those Sundays. You have been carrying, carefully, with both hands, something that was already given to you and had your own name in the giving. Scripture calls it the gift of God, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you with a stopwatch waiting to see how long it took you to notice.

Now let me stop saying he and start saying you, because the man sitting in a truck with the keys in his hand is you.

You know the road. You know the pew. You know how it feels to sing a hymn you could sing in your sleep while a quiet voice underneath asks whether any of this is yours, or whether you are simply very good at your mother's habits.

That question has no standing to sit in judgment on you, and it never had any. The word that stands over you says grace saved you through faith and that faith is not of yourself, and the Spirit who authored that line is not conducting a hearing in the cab of your truck.

I am not going to send you back to check on the nine-year-old. That is the one errand this message will not run. Whether he understood every word of what he was doing is not the hinge, because the hinge was never his grip. It was the gift, and the One who gives is not the sort to take a thing back to see whether it was appreciated properly.

It is already yours. Not on approval, not on loan, not on the condition that you feel it strongly enough on any given Sunday. The written word puts it plainly, it is the gift of God, and the same Holy Spirit who moved into you moved in as a Person and not as a photograph of what He did for your mother.

Fire is not diminished by being passed along. God was never running short, and He did not hand you a copy of what He gave her. He came and gave Himself.