Two Years of Next Week

Wesley Hart drove past the Blue Star at six forty every Tuesday morning for two years, and every Tuesday he meant to pull in.

The invitation had come from Hollis Pate in a hardware store aisle, over a box of deck screws, said the way a man says a thing he has said before to somebody else. Six of them. Back room. Tuesdays at a quarter to seven. Eggs, and each man says one true thing, and nobody talks about it afterward.

Wes said, "Yeah. Yeah, I might do that."

He meant it. He was not lying in the hardware store and he was not lying any of the ninety odd Tuesdays after it.

The first Tuesday he had the truck loaded for Coldwater and the light at Ninth was green and he was through it before he remembered. The second Tuesday there was a slow leak in the right rear and he stopped at the air pump on the other side of the road, so he did not even pass the lot.

Every one of those was true. Not one of them was an excuse when he gave it.

But somewhere in the second winter the reasons stopped being reasons and started being a shape. He would see the sign two blocks out, feel his hands settle on the wheel a certain way, and be past it, and think next week, and next week had stopped being a plan and become a room he lived in.

And a thing started up underneath it that he could not have said out loud. Not I have not gone yet. Something worse. This is who I am. I am a man who means to.

He had believed for nineteen years. He believed it at his father's funeral and on the hood of his truck at two in the morning outside Coldwater the year his marriage nearly went. He had never once said it where somebody could hear him.

March, and the wipers were going, and he came up on the sign with the rain coming sideways off the awning. There was one open space, the near one, by the door.

He did not decide anything. He was not braver that morning than he had been the morning before. He simply turned the wheel, and the truck went in, and then he was sitting in a parking lot with the engine off, which he had never been.

Inside, the back room smelled like bacon grease and wet coats. The coffee pot had a crack in the handle and everybody knew to hold it by the body. Hollis looked up and said, "Wes," the way you say a name you have been saying for two years anyway.

Nobody asked him where he had been. Nobody made a speech.

It came around to him near the end. He put both hands flat on the table and said, "I believe God is good. I have believed it about nineteen years. I have never said it in a room before."

And Hollis said, "All right," and reached over and topped off his cup.

That was it. That was the entire thing. He had carried it for two years as though there were a door on it, and there had never been a door, only a parking lot he had to be in.

According to the power of God

Paul is in a cell, writing to a young man he loves, and he says a strange thing to him.

Be not thou therefore ashamed of the testimony of our Lord, nor of me his prisoner: but be thou partaker of the afflictions of the gospel according to the power of God.2 Timothy 1:8

Stop at the fact that Paul had to say it at all.

Timothy was not a coward. Paul left him in charge of a hard city, called him his own son in the faith, and trusted him with churches. And Paul still writes be not ashamed, which he would not have put in a letter this short if the pull were not real in a man he had watched work.

So hear this as relief and not as diagnosis. The hesitation in you is not a character flaw and it is not a verdict on your faith. The written word aims that sentence at one of the most faithful men in the New Testament, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it in the letter, which He would not have done if it were shameful to need it.

Now the phrase the whole verse turns on, and it is the last five words. According to the power of God.

Not according to your nerve. Not according to how ready you feel by Tuesday. Not according to how long you have already waited, which is the arithmetic you have been running against yourself. Paul is specific in the written text about where the supply comes from, and it is not from you and never was meant to be.

The strength for the saying is not something you work up. It is issued, and it is issued at the moment of the saying and not before. That is the plain sense of the text, and it is the Holy Spirit who delivers it, which is why standing in the driveway trying to feel brave enough has never once produced the feeling. The current does not arrive for a door you are not walking through.

Look at 2 Timothy 1:7, one line earlier, because Paul put it there on purpose. God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Read what that does and does not say. It does not say you have never been afraid. It says the fear is not what God issued you. So when the hands settle on the wheel and the sign goes by, that is weather, and weather has been misread as identity by better people than either of us. What God has given you is power and love and a sound mind, present tense, in your possession right now. I did not invent that inventory. Paul wrote it, and the Spirit who gave those three is the same Spirit standing in your truck.

And one more word in the verse takes the whole weight off the wrong shoulder. Partaker. The Greek behind it means to take your share of hardship along with somebody. Paul is not telling Timothy to go be brave alone. He is telling him to step into a load already being carried and take his corner of it.

Which is the actual shape of a back room with six men and a cracked coffee pot. Nobody there is doing it alone either. The one who speaks after you has his own two years.

Now let me say the rest of it to you and not about him, because the man in the truck is you.

You know the invitation. You know the road it is on. You have meant it every single time, and I want that said out loud, because two years of next week is not two years of cowardice, and every reason you gave was true on the morning you gave it.

The thing that has actually done you harm is not the missed Tuesdays. It is the sentence that grew underneath them, the one about what kind of man or woman this makes you. That sentence has no standing over you and it never had any. The word of God says you were given power and love and a sound mind, and the Holy Spirit does not revise that inventory downward for a person who has driven past a parking lot.

And let me say plainly what I am not doing. I am not naming a day for you, and I am not telling you where to go or what room to be in or what any of it should look like. That is not mine and it is not anybody's. I am telling you only what is already in your hands.